Doc Design

The first draft of the rules for The Deck were, admittedly, hastily put together. I had a general idea of what a rule booklet looked like, but I didn't exactly draw from any specific source. After all, it was a first draft. There would be plenty to come after it. Let's take a look at the first page of the first draft.

I believe I had all the essentials that one would require for such a document, and I suppose that, as far as content was concerned, I was correct. The form, however, leaves something to be desired. The title "The Deck" is centered, Calibri, and 18 points. That's all well and good, but it doesn't stand out much. The entire document is formatted in Calibri, with the only differences being the font size and whether something was bold or underlined. At least I had headings. I did that right. 

There is white space between the different sections, but there's also a huge amount of white space at the bottom of the page. That's because the next section couldn't fit within the space allotted on page 1, so I moved it down to page 2. It seems wasteful. The margins are also the standard 1" from each edge. It is, essentially, an academic document with a little extra formatting. It could be worse, but it could also be a lot better.

Eventually, I got some friends of mine to play the game and brought along that draft. There was a lot of confusion and a lot of people trying to find certain things within the rules, but I chalked that up to a combination of some new and complicated game mechanics and the the writing. When I went through the rules, however, I didn't really find too much that needed adjusting within the writing. Then why were people having such a difficult time reading the rules? It was because of the document.

Let's look at an equivalent amount of the most recent version of the rule book.

Quite a different piece, I believe. The biggest change was in designing the document to be printed double-sided and folded in half to make a book rather than an essay. The title is on the cover, where it belongs, along with an image (the one in this draft will be replaced when a real logo gets designed). It's also much larger (26 point) and in a sans serif font. In fact, all of the headers are now in a capitalized, sans serif font. They jump out more, making each section more clearly defined.

The margins vary around the edges, and are wider toward the middle of the document where it will be folded in half. There is also less white space at the top than at the bottom, focusing readers' attention on the page numbers and initial headers more. The information following the headings is still indented, like in the previous version of the document. The page numbers are missing from the table of contents, but it's still a work in progress. They'll get there in time.

I think that even in just this first page/two pages, a lot of improvement is clear. We'll look at some other stuff next time, so look forward to seeing what else is in store for the most recent version.