Layout Part III: The Full Monty

I sat down with a giant pile of OSR pdfs, mixed in the lessons I learned working on Battletech books, considered the general feel I wanted, and went to work.  For the most part, what's left is

Fantastic Fonts (and Where to Find Them)

My previous posts lead to picking out a variety of visual elements that do and do not work, or ones that I simply liked more than others (I try not to confuse the two).  But this doesn't settle one of the most important layout choices: the font.  Ultimately I went with the B/X classic font, Souvenir Lt BT.  However, you may not want to just ape TSR design choices, a perfectly respectable decision, and at first neither did I.  As such, below is what I did during the earlier stages of putting the book together, when I was considering other options.  Even though I've since abandoned this, it's a good general procedure to help you choose between multiple candidates.

Say we want to work with a classic looking seriffed text.  The easiest way to choose something that looks good is to choose a typical block of text and run it through all the possible candidates.  We'll need to make sure that there's both letters and numbers in there, as some fonts do well with one, but not the other.

Here's my guinea pig text block:

When in the wilderness, characters use different movement rates. Small creatures move 90 yards a minute, Medium creatures move 120 yards a minute, and Large creatures move 160 yards a minute.  
      Further, characters in the wilderness can move their outdoor movement rate divided by 5 in miles per day: a character that moves at 120 can thus move 24 miles per day. If not all characters have the same movement, to stay together the party must move only as fast as the slowest character. Also note that this assumes unfinished but dry, generally good trails. Other conditions will alter the distance travelled in a day, as detailed below.

I'm not actually using that text in my book, but it works great here as a sample.

Click to enlarge

All the fonts here are 9.5 except Times New Roman and Baskerville, which were bumped up to 10 to better match the rest.  Each one also has 1.1 spacing, because I know I'll be using that in my book: it's a great way to let your text breathe, especially when you can't avoid having large blocks of text and so can't use some of the other usual tricks to break up the visual monotony.

Even with the size increase, Baskerville winds up looking a bit cramped.  While it's the font I always use when writing a Sherlock Holmes pastiche (for obvious reasons), I think I can pass on it here.

Cambria looks a bit too stark.  Times New Roman I don't like because of the way its "r" encroaches on other letters.  When this happens with an "n" (as in "wilderness") the result often appears to be an "m".  Bruce is a bit thin, and Book Antiqua a bit stretched lengthwise for my liking.  I like Constantia the best, overall: each character can breathe just right, the resulting words look firm, yet it takes bolding well (some fonts are so strong than when you bold them there's not enough of a immediately noticeable difference, which is important when you're going to be applying bolding to create headers with that font).  I think Constantia would be the easiest to read.  However, what the hell is it doing to those poor numbers?  Why would anyone want their numerals compressed to itty bitty sizes?  Fortunately, as someone pointed out in the (now-Google-purged) comments, Constantia has an alternate set of numbers that looks more normal, which can be accessed in Word via Font --> Advanced --> Number Forms.  But of course, the above is just how I felt about it all: in the end you'll want to go with what most appeals to you.

 

If you're looking for a list of the fonts that TSR used, check out this extremely thorough site.

 

Exciting Font Stuff

 

Now it's time to put together a sample page with the full range of fonts and headers and other visual elements and see how it all comes together.  Click the following to get a ten-page pdf sample of how the book currently looks (there's a blank page to start so that you can see what it looks like as an actual book, by switching to two-page view).

Simulacrum Layout Sample

Notavirus.exe

I intend to walk through the process of designing the whole game here in this blog, but I felt I'd best have a bunch of it ready to go so that I actually have something to talk about. 

 

From OSRIC and, to a lesser degree, ACKS I took the idea of colour splashes. Even printed out in greyscale, this will look fine: the layout isn't reliant on colour, only enhanced if you have it. OSRIC's chapter headers (i.e. Heading 1) use Optima. I don't have access to that, but I do have Optima BQ, which is pretty close and quite sharp. My chapter header (on pages 17 and 26) is green, all-caps 25-point bold, and I've expanded the character spacing by 0.5 points to give it just a bit more room to breathe (this can be done in MS Word under Font --> Advanced).  Lastly, it has single line spacing and a Text Outline.

For the Heading 2 ("ENCOUNTERS") I'm also using Optima BQ.  This is also green, all-caps and bold, but is 15 pt and only expanded by 0.3 points.  It uses 1.1 line spacing, like my regular body text.

There are two other headings.  Heading 3 ("ENCOUNTER TIME") is all-caps bold, 10.5 pt Souvenir Lt BT, expanded by 0.1 points.  In addition to the usual 1.1 line spacing, I added an extra 1 point of padding at the bottom of this one.

Heading 4 is the last one ("Effects of Surprise").  It's simply the body text, but bold.

Body text is Souvenir Lt BT. It's 9.5 points, expanded (i.e. stretched) by 0.1 points, and with 1.1 line spacing, which means that each line will breathe a bit more.  I've decided to skip the typical line breaks to separate paragraphs that most OSR games use (no doubt inspired by B/X and the 1st ed AD&D books), and switch to indents like Mentzer used.  However, I found the standard indent units a bit small (0.5 cm is common): I wanted no doubt that a new para had begun, and so upped it to 0.6 cm.  But I never indent the first line underneath a header, because that's hideously ugly and a waste of space aside.

 

The text is justified, meaning that each line ends in the same place and Word inserts the appropriate padding as needing evenly across an entire line to make it all work out.  MS Word 2010 and earlier have better justification settings than later versions, based on ancient WordPerfect 6.0 (thanks to another now-purged comment for showing me this), so I use a later version of Word but a document originally created in 2010 with the old-style justification preserved as a compatibility setting.  With justification and columns you need to be a bit more careful in your writing, as it becomes easy to have a large word not fit on a line and so be bumped to the next line, leaving a large amount of space for Word to have to fill in, which in turn    makes    your    sentence    look    like    this.  The only way to fix that is to edit your text specifically to avoid it, by changing your word choice and placement so that each line is relatively full.

 

Other Stuff

 

Each page is offset towards the edge.   That is, there's more blank space on the inside margin than the outside.  That's so when you print it, you don't lose info due to the binding, by having text disappear into the spine where the fold is.  The standard approach is that each margin is the same, but I wanted the space and didn't mind things being uneven in this way.

Column spacing in between is 0.9 cm.  It might be tempting to shrink that down and thus gain more room for text, but you don't want to overdo it: again, you need space for the text to breathe.  Tiny column margins are one of the biggest causes of having a page feel cramped.

Headers are the standard 1.27 cm, footers are 0.8 cm.  I don't know offhand how many hogsheads that is in imperial, sorry.  I've kept the headers large because after I put words and such up there I don't want a cramped effect to occur.

You can see what I'm using for headers in most of the book by looking up top in the first sample page: just chapter references to help when page flipping.  It's the standard body text, but italicized.  With some fonts, italics tends to cramp things a bit, so you may want to add more expansion to the characters if you're doing that, but with Souvenir Lt it works fine with my standard 0.1.

In the header on the second page there's a cool little spear thingy graphic; it just looks nice and thematic.  Generally, the header is valuable real estate, but on the first page of each chapter I've gone with this instead (because just as I complained about ACKS putting its own book title up top, you don't need to waste the readers' ink and time typing out what they already know: in this case the chapter title is already right in front of them in screaming huge letters).

Page numbers are aimed to the corners of each page for easy flipping.  I've taken OSRIC's lesson of making them big (11 pt) and bold.  You want to make that leap out at readers flipping through the pages looking for something.

Text Boxes: I learned very quickly that I did not like thin-border text boxes.  I've worked on other homebrew projects before this one and found the same MS Word setting that Swords & Wizardry probably uses, and I've employed that here.  The boxes have been coloured green to match the major headings.  I plan to use boxes to set off things I consider absolutely essential, that apply to multiple elements on the page, and maybe in a few other cases where I want to remove information from the main body yet keep it readily accessible to the reader.  In the case of the box on page 3, it's essential; in the box on page 1 it applies both to force marching and terrain, while also being relevant to encumbrance later on, so I didn't want to risk readers missing it by placing it in just any one of those places, but I didn't want to feel the need to repeat it three times either.

I don't actually use them that often (twice in the 56 pages for the Player's Manual): a little goes a long way.

Tables: Again inspired by OSRIC, I've gone with green shading (I really like green).  However, I've alternated between white space and colour, whereas OSRIC goes all-colour all-the-time, and just varies the shading.  I think that reduces the usefulness of shading your table rows, which is intended to help guide the eyes across them.

Bullet Points: I like to use a little design that Word provides, rather than the standard dots--it just makes it look a touch less generic.  I also break up each point with a very small line break (from 3 to 4 points, depending on how much space I have on that page).  You could just stack it all directly on top of each other and it would generally read fine, but (again) I really like things to be able to breathe.

Drop Caps: That's what the giant capital "I" is called at the start of page 3.  Word makes doing this very easy (Insert --> Drop Cap), and it's a classic look.  I do it at the start of every chapter.

Art: While I used a lot of placeholder images early on (like in the old layout sample up top), all my art now is licensed stuff.  The bulk of my art comes from Dean Spencer and the late Martin McKenna.

Welp

So here we are.  Of course, after critiquing other peoples' hard work for two posts, I'm prepared for a bit of the like in return: no hard feelings.  Some of this is subjective, but I think the principles of making text readable are not so much, even if the result will be aesthetically displeasing to some.

Also, I've come across a very nice overview of layout with regards to RPG design, which can only help more.

Okay, now we can actually start designing and writing rules.

(Updated 2021-07)