My training as a graphic designer has led me to love good design. Good design, in my eyes means the design should be understated and simple. It should not draw attention to itself but should serve the text. Common fonts should be used because there is nothing worse than a PDF bloated with extra fonts except a PDF without rare fonts that have to be downloaded by the user for things to display correct. I hate watermarked art on every page, art should serve as a mental bookmarks and shouldn't use up all the ink in your printer. Also art should have something to do with the accompanying text and should never cross over the text. When I see bad design in game books it makes me a little sad.
I would have provided graphic design work for free when I graduated and needed a job. Anything for the portfolio. I'm pretty sure there are designers out there now that would do the same. Yet bad design is everywhere. At some point I'll make a post with examples, but not here.
My day job as a technical writer is to take complicated information and format it and rearrange it to make it easy to follow. That is another issue that role playing games seem to be somewhat poor at. Not just within a book but in deciding how to divide information into multiple books. Many games are beautiful but not organized well, others are organized very well but are horribly ugly. Again, some folks should hire a designer, and others should judge design on readability, not on cool, as cool fades with use and actually becomes annoying if it gets between you and what you need to find in the book.
Hopefully my training as a Graphic Designer and a Technical Writer will enable my fantasy heart breaker to clean and easy to use.
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