Creating Cards
July 24, 2018
Hey everyone! Just thought I’d talk a bit about how the card designs are made. All of the programs I will talk about today are free to use and can make very high quality products all things considered.
Creating cards (with Gimp and Inkscape):
Gimp is a photo editing software that works very similarly to Adobe Photoshop. It’s also a clear cut above other programs like Microsoft Paint, with the ability to easily manage multiple layers and use more complex tools. I usually use Gimp for editing photos or graphics, such as any of the artwork that I use. It is one of those tools that I actually find very useful outside of just game design for digitally coloring in drawings, designing logos, or even making memes. It is also very easy to pick up and learn. A few tips for a beginner would be to learn about the scissors, clone, and perspective tools, which are really useful and can cover most of the basic image editing that needs to be done.
Inkscape is a vector graphics program, which makes it really great for making card designs. I never heard of vector graphics until a friend introduced them to me, but for a quick rundown they basically treat everything you make as an object. This makes it really easy to create text and move it around because in other applications (like Gimp), text would instead be treated as pixels that you would have to be more careful about editing. I think Inkscape is a perfect application therefore for making the designs of the cards while Gimp is better for editing the artwork that would then go on the card. I heard of other people using Excel to make card designs, but in my experience Inkscape is so much easier to use and then edit later. A few tips for a beginner would be to use the right sidebar as much as possible to edit text, manage colors, and export final images. In the example image I put below, the program actually allows you to edit the text on the sidebar, which ends up saving a lot of time because it is really easy to mess something up if you try to edit the text directly. This way, you only have to use the workspace to click on things and drag them around or resize them.
A lot of this applies to the player board as well, which also was designed through Inkscape. Overall, both programs are useful tools that you should consider using if you are designing a game. Let me know what you think in the comments, and subscribe by using the purple widget to your right!