Card background colour - can it serve a purpose?

It currently appears that the background colour of a card is random.

The Giant Oarfish background has a pinkish colour, and the African Striped Weasel has a blue-grey colour.

I would like to suggest the colour be made symbolic of its position in the foodchain i.e: Yellow, Black, Green, Brown, or Red.

As a food web is established this would create an interesting and consistent pattern that will tend to have Yellow's, Blacks, and Greens clustered towards the centre of the web, and Red's bordering around the outside.

Comments?

Cheers,
-T.

Tangram wrote:I would like to suggest the colour be made symbolic of its position in the foodchain i.e: Yellow, Black, Green, Brown, or Red.

As a food web is established this would create an interesting and consistent pattern that will tend to have Yellow's, Blacks, and Greens clustered towards the centre of the web, and Red's bordering around the outside.

I like this idea and especially the concept of an emergent pattern of coloration in the game layout. The downside is that this would allow designers less space to be creative with color choice to complement the card artwork.

If a color family rather than a specific individual color were specified designers would have more freedom.

One caveat, since these are currently pretty pale backgrounds, this can make them difficult to tell apart in less than ideal lighting. With pale tones its also important to make sure you don't accidentally picks ones that look identical to colorblind individuals, which can make the game unplayable.

The Vischeck websitewill let you check an image file to see how it looks to the 3 common types of colorblind people. There's also a photoshop plugin you can use to do it.

Boardgame geek has a thread showing off games with this issue Surprisingly there's some games that are 'color based' that ARE still perfectly playable when colorblind... the hues are just far enough apart that they're distinguisable as "different" colors, they colorblind players just sees different colors than the rest of the players!

Good discussion here, and definitely something we can re-evaluate. Initially, the current colour scheme was chosen for two main reasons.

1. Since we rely on art submissions from a variety of different sources, we don't have the community numbers to say, "we'd like a picture of x, AND it has to look good with a card background colour of Y." However, we can have a go with (say) the next 12 or so cards, just to see how it looks?

2. The pale colours were to save on ink use (the most expensive part if most ink jet printers). This I think we'll have to stick with (at least with the online printing part).

Anyway, what do you think of mucking around with the next 12 or so cards, just to see how they look?

Take a peek at the cards of the last little while. I've tried the "stick to certain colours idea." What do you think?

I see the point of choosing colors that matches the image, but a frame would help to smoothen out if we chose other colors, for instance, a narrow line at the top and bottom of the image. The CCG Magic:the gathering seems to solve this by having the artists stick to colors that matches the color of the card he is going to design.

An example of how colors distorts perception - the white tiger card (from "cards") is so blue that at first I thought it was a water animal.

My suggestion is that background color is fixed to terrains, for example
desert - sand
forest - forest green
freshwater - blue
grassland - green or yellow
ocean - navy
tundra - violet or gray
and at last, maybe event cards should have their own color, too?

These colors should be pale, as said previously, to save ink. This would allow cards to be quickly identificated, simply by color. In black and white print, we would still have the symbols at the bottom of the cards for that.

When a species belong to several terrains, colors could blend in from different corners.

I really like the new card design used in the coral reef deck, where the image fills up all of the card, and background colors are transparent.

Example: this is a special lion living in both deserts and grasslands. The terrain symbols would be there somewhere in the bottom, too.

Background colour was debated a while back, and for a 18 card string (back in the second half of 2010), cards stayed with colour according to their trophic strategy.

High quality decks such as the coral reef one will always go the route of full image (mainly because it looks really good).

I dunno - any more comments on the prospect of choosing set colours (whether it's trophic strategy or terrain or even temperature).

Note that blending colours isn't currently an option with the current wordpress iteration of how the background is produced.

Lundefaul wrote:
and at last, maybe event cards should have their own color, too?

Black?