So you've finalized the design for your latest deck, built a VASSAL extension, tested it, tweaked it, and are ready to commit it to cardstock. Great! Obviously we can't all be graphic designers, but there's a few simple steps that can be taken to ensure your decks look as good as possible.

PLEASE NOTE: This article is not about the process of designing a deck, and assumes that the design work has already been completed. This article is only about the layout of cards and decks, and the steps necessary to take the deck from a text file to a PDF ready for printing.

ALSO PLEASE NOTE: This article assumes you're making a printable deck. A different set of considerations comes into play when creating VASSAL decks.

There are two main phases to deck layout - designing the templates for the cards themselves, and then laying out the text. You will, at minimum, need two programs do complete these tasks - one for the template design, and one for the deck layout. While there are any number of tools that are appropriate to each task, we will be focusing specifically on GIMP for template design and Microsoft Word for deck layout. Addendums from users of other programs are more than welcome.

Some Quick Defintions

A handful of terms it will be useful to understand to get your decks to look the best.

Bitmap: Think of a JPEG like a sheet of graph paper. You color each square a different color, and that forms the overall picture. A bitmap graphic works like this. It's easy to make a bitmap graphic smaller, because the computer just erases some squares (called pixels) and averages others with the colors of their neighboring squares. However, making a bitmap larger usually results in a blurry image, because it creates empty pixels, and GIMP has to guess what the best color is to put in them. Note also that it's very hard to do curves in a bitmap, because the curves are actually compirsed of little squares of varying shades of darkness. Text, in particular, looks very bad in bitmap graphics, unless you like the chunky, blocky look.

Vector: Instead of graph paper, vector graphics consist of points and lines. You tell the computer the relative positions of some points, and the lines between them, and the properties of the object those points and lines create. Text in Word is handled as vector art becuase the computer can fill in the curve information it needs on the fly; in GIMP you have to rasterize it, or convert it into a bitmap, before you save your picture. Vector art is nice because you can change the size all around without ever affecting the quality of the image.

DPI: Acronym that stands for dots per inch. This refers to the resolution of the image. On screen, you use 72 dpi, or 72 pixels for each inch of your image. When printing, you want greater DPI, which allows for crisper detail on the final print. 300 dpi is considered the professional standard, but for most purposes, 150 to 200 dpi is usually good enough.

Template: As described in this document, "template" refers to a blank image of each card that is used to lay out the final deck document.

Templates

Do create your templates in GIMP before you add any text to any cards. You'll need one template for each kind of card in the deck. Usually, this is a basic combat card for each character, power and special cards for the major, and occasionally power and special cards for the minor.

DON'T SET THE TEXT FOR YOUR CARDS IN THE GIMP OR WHATEVER IMAGE PROGRAMMING YOU ARE USING! I cannot stress this enough. The reason you don't want to do this is that you'll have to convert your images into a bitmap format, and you lose the smooth printing and curves that vector text gives you.

Do use a template with a high DPI, at least 150 or more. On screen, the card will look larger than it will look when it's printed.

Do take advantage of the GIMP's Layers feature. This allows you to put each element of your template in a seperate layer, and any modifications you make will affect that layer only and not the entire image as a whole. This is very useful for, say, changing the border color of the card without changing the color cast of the whole card.

Don't try to create complex back art for your card. It's virtually impossible to line up a sheet of cardstock for double-printing. If your cards have what's called a full bleed on the back, you won't have to worry about alignment issues. A full bleed means the card backs don't have an inherant border, so they form one solid mass of color. Therefore, if you cut the lines from the card fronts, you never have to worry about the card backs lining up as long as the artwork is more or less centered.

Do do as much layout in the GIMP as possible. One idea is to create an 8.5x11 image in GIMP, and use it create a 3x3 grid of your blank templates. Then save this image as a TIF file and import it into Microsoft word. For example, you could make one page with 9 major character combat cards, one with 9 minor character combat cards, one with 9 power/special cards, and one with the 3 remaining power/special cards and the 1 remaining major character combat card.

Do make sure that your cards have a full outline. As the bottom of power and special cards is white, they can be very difficult to cut out if they aren't fully outlined.

Do save your images as TIF rather than JPEG files. When you turn your Word document into a PDF, the graphics will get compressed using JPEG compression - so if you save them as JPEGs initially, they'll get compressed twice, once when you save them and AGAIN when you create the PDF. This results in lots of noise speckles on your cards. TIF files are large, but the PDF will be small because it gets compressed.

Layout

Do use the Insert Picture command in Microsoft Word to get the graphics into your document, rather than using the copy/paste technique. This is becaue Microsoft Word converts graphics to the Windows Metafile Format when you paste, which reduces their quality. To do this, go to the Insert menu and choose Picture. A small sub-menu will pop up; choose From File from the sub-menu. You'll then get a standard Open File dialog box. Navigate to where the template image is stored.

Don't import your individual card templates one at a time into the Word document. When you do this, it's nearly impossible to align your cards flush against one another, which means extra cutting work on the part of whoever is cutting out the printed cards. Instead, import the 3x3 grids discussed above. 4x2 is also popular, but you'll have to orient your document for landscape printing to get those to align correctly.

Do use text boxes to align your text. This allows you to adjust the text elements of each card individually without worrying about the alignment of the rest of the document. To create a text box, go to the Insert menu and choose Text Box. The cursor should change shape to a small cross. Use the cross to draw the outline of your text box, then click the cursor inside the text box to type. When you're done, right-click (control-click for Mac users) on the border of the box and choose Format Text Box or Format Object (it does the same thing, but the wording will differ depending on which version of Word you're using). When the dialog box pops up, click the tab for "Line & Fill" and click the "No Fill" and "No Line" buttons. This makes the boundaries of the text box invisible so the text box does not interfere with your card art.

Do make duplicates of your text boxes to fill your templates. This both saves you typing and ensures alignment. To duplicate a text box, click on it, then hold down both the Shift and Ctrl keys (Shift and Option on the Mac). Drag the text box into it's proper position on the new card template, and you'll get an exact copy of your text box that's in line with the one you just created.

Do convert your document into a PDF file for distribution. Not only does this make the document accessible to those without Microsoft Word, it also ensures that people will view your document correctly even if they don't have the same fonts installed. If you don't own a copy of the full version of Adobe Acrobat, please see the ABC's of Deck Making for links to free tools and services you can use to convert your Word document into PDF format.