In our last design delve, I talked a bit about the process of commissioning some of our wonderful art. Today I’m going to take you behind the scenes on the graphics side, and talk a little about how the general design direction evolved. This is the story of all the art that isn’t the art.
New Nouveau
My earliest mock-ups were very simple - name and numbers, a quick image in a box and an ability.
From the start I wanted there to be a clear image, though its relevance to the ability was unimportant, and I prototyped by grabbing cool witchy pics from Pinterest.
Magic Circle by Waterhouse, cropped very roughly.
After early testing I realised I didn’t want huge, complex text boxes like a Magic card. The way this game was going to work, each ability could be of limited complexity. That meant I could have a lot of space for artwork, and seeing as people would spend a lot of time looking at their cards, the more illustration there was, the better. As I locked into the core theme (witchcraft), I wanted powerful characters to stare out of the art at you, but I also wanted the art to flow with the design of the card in general.
This combination felt like an art style I’d fallen in love with years before. Where Alphonse Mucha’s work was commercial, it integrated elements of text for advertising drinks or theatre performances, and merged that with his highly decorative frames. I felt I could use the frames to distinguish my cast, but still have consistency in design card to card.
This led to a first design concept like the cards to the right.
These are rough, but I felt like I could see where this would become a full design that could work.
The Tension of Utility and Beauty
The frames have to do a number of jobs. They have to each be visually engaging (“pretty”), but they also have to work as a set: card abilities and values that affect the game have to be clear, and consistently laid out. These aspects are often in tension, and whilst elegant design can itself be beautiful, in general the more illustrative aspects of a card are, the less legible it becomes.
I liked how my (very pointy) background elements pulled through the coloured frames, so that the background of the card played with the imagery.
This felt like a lot of the illustrations I saw modern artists using in their Mucha-esque illustrations. Images like those to the right were inspirations for what I wanted Which Witch? cards to feel like.
Catwoman by Michele Frigo
Nabooru by Jacqueline Florencio. Later, she would join our team to draw Hecate and Titania.
The art was obviously not integrated at this stage, and the backgrounds didn’t flow with the art as I wanted, but I had the concept. This was going to work.
With confidence in the essential shape required for illustrations, we could start on commissions.
Mock-up to Prototype
At this stage a lot of playtesting occurred without much design progression, but eventually it became time to push through to something more fleshed out in terms of frames and layout. This is where it was time to start putting design hours into frames we could use for real.
The names (especially long ones like Tamamo-no-Mae) were hard to read with the bend around the circular art portal.
I wanted the central circle of the illustration to be pushed as much as I could, and text to take as little space as I could get away with. Later, we’d push back on this, increasing the font as much as possible whilst not destroying the aesthetic.
You might also notice how different the text font was, and its weird spacing
The toes and skirt break the textbox bounds, as do the florals
Each card has two primary colours in the frame (the base colours top and bottom). Variation between cards helps keep each card in your hand distinct, and makes card recognition across a table far easier. These frames, now redesigned, had gained a fluidity that felt much more nouveau to me than the sharpened swirls of before. The big colours that help mechanically also now have floral patterning that felt more than the simple solid surfaces that had come before.
The next step was to integrate the frame and art - to have the white background broken by the witch so she pulls herself out of the card towards you.
At this point I was looking at art on screen and I liked how these sit. If you’re reading this article in light mode, you’ll find the edges of the card bleed into the background of the page - this felt how I wanted it to feel.
Then we got prototypes produced…
The white borders looked good on screen but on printed card they looked… different. Part of the issue was how thick they had to be for the “safe print” zones (in my initial designs, I’d anticipated less required padding than the printer actually required). Partly because unlike a screen, almost no real-world background is white, partly because the border was so much larger than first thought, I decided to revise the background colour.
The back image for the prototypes was black bordered - using the idea of moon’s shadow to silhouette a witch - so it is unclear which witch it indeed was.
Cat v4.2. There have been a lot of cats.
Card Back
I’d also made the familiars, and for contrast with the witches, I’d done these with black borders. It had been a fairly quick and dirty alteration for the prototype; the background under the image was sketchy, and the white text box felt oddly pulled in from the frame, but the background showed promise.
Several visitors at UKGE pointed out they preferred the black frames. There had also been numerous comments that it was a shame we weren’t doing Tarot-sized cards given the aesthetics of the game. It was also at the expo that for the first time I’d started using a separate set of cards that included Dusk, Veil and Witching Hour to call the turn cycle*.
This is where we realised we needed a tarot set for the turn call, and poker cards for your regular hand. I dove back into Photoshop...
*Other prototyped versions included this clock board and a “Witch’s Road” for the Calling
The Last Big Changes
Some of the background experiments
Before starting on Tarot-sized frames, it was time to work out the backgrounds. Part of me wanted to move to an off-white, the kind of old paper/sand colours you get on a lot of the original Mucha pieces, and modern interpretations.
There were a bunch of discussions on these, but in the end the fades all introduced problems with contrast on some witches, even if they looked good on others, meaning I made the call for solid backgrounds.
Ghost comic cover by Adam Hughes
The witches in Tarot size were our chance to push for the maximum amount of art size - no text required. It was this design that made us settle on the classical aesthetic in the tarot cards. Meanwhile the poker cards, with their inherently more “game piece” feel, would be rendered black bordered.
Time to get some more prototypes printed!
Tarot and Poker card Titanias at relative size, still undergoing colour experimentation
An Aside on Tarot Card Size
Hey, did you know there are two common sizes of Tarot card? That they’re the exact same width, but different heights? Did you know that when you don’t double check your printing template before starting you’re more likely to make a mistake? Like I did with the border size on the white prototypes?
Sigh.
At least this time I caught it only one witch into the process.
Larger (correct) template to the left
Final Refinements
With all illustrations now complete, I did some final adjustments to the templating to get ready for manufacture. Some of the colours for witches were tweaked to give more variation, especially in the top framing to make sure each witch had a unique header colour, and colour pair.
The journey to the final frame was not swift or faultless, but then what artistic endeavour is? I hope you all like the cards in Which Witch? as much as I now do.
Which Witch? is launching on Kickstarter
on Thursday October 15th!
During the campaign expect all of our content to be Which Witch related - from progress on the campaign, through our visit to Spiel at Essen, to what we got up to for Halloween, and finally to how lucky we were that our campaign could end on Friday 13th!