Design Diaries: Iconised Keywords, Revised

With the Visual Interest Design Diary from last Thursday, we introduced a number of new things we are doing in terms of art and card design to try to break up the monotony of proxy cards while we continue to solicit artwork from the greater community. While people responded well to some of what we were doing, there was a strong pushback on our rollout of the iconised keywords.

We appreciate the comments of those who are opposed to iconisation in general, but there are multiple factors at play which we are considering when pursuing this route:

• Modern game design and internationalization. Fewer games are using the route of unbroken big text blocks, and less text to translate on cards is helpful to any such future efforts. We didn't really talk about this in the last Design Diary, but we had already had such discussions internally, and others brought this up supportively in online discussions, which made for a good reason to reiterate it here.

• Saving space in card text. Even small savings allow us to make moderately complex abilities without the text becoming microscopic, or allow us to put more flavor text on cards, which we occasionally have had to sacrifice. Nonetheless, while this is important, we felt it was the goal multiple people seized on in their criticism, while missing the next goal, which we consider equally if not more important.

• Making cards more visually distinct. Our original goal was to have cards with large blocks of text, especially cards with only icon-type placeholder art, have ways of standing out visually on the field, to assist people with having to process all of the text.

That said, we have given serious consideration to the reactions and constructive criticism we received. People reacted more favorably to our suite of "attack icons" than the iconised keywords, so we are holding on to those as-is. We did not want the rollout of the iconised keywords to be a huge negative stain on the release of what, overall, has been a great success as a community-driven expansion, and as a result, have taken the concept back into the workshop to address several points which were raised.

• Icons should not be mixed with keywords in the keyword line.

One of the first pieces of feedback we received was from contributing artist Jonny Hinkle, who suggested moving the icons to their own space on the frame of the card. We had resisted doing anything like this initially because we are limited by our understanding of the card composition software we use, but some research (and a lot of trial and error) has gotten us to a point where we now know how to do this in an automated manner. Compositing cards by hand is something we internally agreed we were absolutely never going to do, so this breakthrough was big.

• Icons were too similar in appearance. With the original rollout, all of the icons used a circle format which made them visually indistinct when reduced to scale.

• Color icons in text are less desirable, both for accessibility and because they will not translate well to greyscale proxies.

While we were exploring the layout issue above, we were approached by community member Chris Quesenberry, who designed new vector art for the icons, and came up with new concepts and better versions of our non-element keyword icons in particular. Having someone more skilled at graphic design volunteer new ideas for our project could only improve on our original ham-handed efforts.

We did not want to abandon the color versions entirely, but took to heart the criticism that they did not belong as part of in-line text. With the change in layout to give iconised keywords their own space, we elected to keep the color versions as large "stamped" icons with a circle background, similar to the original rollout. Keeping color on these makes them visually distinct, and increasing their size in the new layout space makes them easier to interpret.

Within card text itself, each of these color keyword icons is now paired with a smaller black and white version which reads the same. The black and white icons were tested and revised for distinctiveness and legibility, and we are much happier with their current iteration.

Many thanks to Jonny, Chris, and community member Mykael Dolph, whose feedback was invaluable in helping us reach this next step. To that end, here are the same "iconised keyword" cards from the last Design Diary with the updated layout and templating, along with a bonus preview, and a sample remaster of a card from Onyx Edition.