Card Mock Ups For Printing

This topic is for discussing card design for printing purposes. If you are interested in doing some fancy CSS work to render the cards beautifully on-line, check the topic https://phylomon.forumotion.net/phylomon-f1/card-mock-ups-mainly-due-to-wired-piece-deadline-which-is-monday-morning-btw-t17.htm.
Below is the link to a PDF of my first draft of the printed card. This is in no way official or accepted. All feedback is welcome, and all source files are available upon request.
One potential advantage of such a design is that you can take a database entry or XML/JSON object and automatically generate these cards as PDFs. I don't know exactly how that would work yet, but automation certainly lends itself to an open source project like this.

http://file.radioonfire.com/northern_cardinal_001_view_opt.pdf(PDF)

For more information, see the previous posting: https://phylomon.forumotion.net/phylomon-f1/card-mock-ups-mainly-due-to-wired-piece-deadline-which-is-monday-morning-btw-t17-15.htm#335. Please leave all relevant comments here.

The artistic aspect of it is really nice, but I think the layout of the text could use some tweaks.

For instance, the positioning of the creative commons licensing data seems strange. Perhaps it should be down by the artist info instead? Maybe swapping places with the bit of text about habitats? And it seems like some textual reference to creative commons should be included as well as those icons, to help people who haven't heard of CC figure out what these weird little pictures mean.

Also, the space directly under the picture is a great place to put something that people will definitely see. So perhaps it would be better to put something that features more prominently in most rulesets there. Maybe -- and I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but I thought I'd throw it out there -- the kingdom,phylum,class text and the organism's name could swap places.

The design does look quite nice, though. This is definitely a big step in the right direction, if you ask me.

Here are a couple new mock ups. They take into consideration some of the feedback from others and more thought I've given it.

For instance, the positioning of the creative commons licensing data seems strange. Perhaps it should be down by the artist info instead? Maybe swapping places with the bit of text about habitats? And it seems like some textual reference to creative commons should be included as well as those icons, to help people who haven't heard of CC figure out what these weird little pictures mean.

Now they're moved to the bottom along with the artistic credit. I've simplified the habitat notation as well; now there is only one habitat represented graphically, while the others are simply text (near the middle left). I changed the climate back to text. By using words with a colored background, we leave one less thing for players to learn and remember.

Also, the space directly under the picture is a great place to put something that people will definitely see. So perhaps it would be better to put something that features more prominently in most rulesets there. Maybe -- and I'm not sure if this is a good idea, but I thought I'd throw it out there -- the kingdom,phylum,class text and the organism's name could swap places.

I have left the taxonomy front and center, since I think it's potentially an important gameplay mechanic. If this turns out not to be the case, however, I agree we should move something mission critical to that position.

I changed the coloring scheme for the backgrounds of cards. Now rather than being colored by habitat, they are colored by Kingdom. This is helpful for a few reasons. First, we already have a graphical representation of a habitat, so that is mostly redundant. Second, it helps with diet. In concept I understand that a lion is a carnivore, but in the game there needs to be an indication of how this plays out (needs to eat animals, or members of the kingdom Animalia).

As always, source files are available upon request.

Those look really good. The juxtaposition of the taxonomy text relative to its background seems a bit off, but that's not really very important at all. I can't really think of any major improvements to make here. Maybe a little bit of trivia-based flavor text about the organism at the bottom, right above the artist info a la Pokemon, but that's not of major importance.

Very nice mockups, I do like the layout of the infromation. Just one suggestion from a practical standpoint. Usually there is a small border around every card. Trading card games generally have those to keep people from being able to peak colors from their deck and give themselves an advantage.

Good point. Also, there was some discussion in the map-building thread about marking up the edges of cards. Leaving a little buffer room to do that in would be a good idea. Obviously they wouldn't go right up to the edges for stated reasons, but near it.

This brings to mind an important point -- said markings shouldn't go too near corners, as those get folded around most easily. But that's off topic for this thread.