Gray Icons

While we still have an adventure series in the works for the Shroud, as well as one or two other products in mind, we’re getting close to feeling like we can wrap up that particular worldseed. Everything we’ve done so far except for the adventure series, in fact, would work pretty well all bundled up as a print-on-demand collection from Lulu — something we’ve had as a plan on our radar for a while.

Problem is, 4E’s layout — which we’ve been following closely in our own products — is strongly color-driven, in terms of color conveying meaning.  Olive means monster.  Gold means item.  And green, maroon, and dark grey are your at-will, encounter, and daily powers.

It’s those latter bits that are particularly troublesome when moving into print on demand.  Sure, we could do a color print on demand product, but color POD tends to be gigantically expensive — we’d have to set a price-point much higher than other comparable color interior books with the same kind of page count.  So that means we need to consider how to translate our material over into a greyscale presentation.

Monsters and items aren’t really a problem, when it comes down to it — their context tends to be pretty obvious when they show up somewhere.  The real trouble comes with those powers, where you could have a bunch of them in succession, without it being immediately obvious (unless you’re very good at scanning the blocks for a particular keyword) what class of power it is you’re looking at.

Some of those doing third party 4E support have chosen to confront this issue in different ways.  Goodman Games, at least as far as I’ve seen, opts to ignore the concern, while Mongoose has established a trio of icons in the power headers.  These icons are a sequence of “swirls”, progressing from many, smaller swirls for an at-will power, to just a pair of large swirls to signify a daily power.

Personally I favor visual shorthand over no shorthand, so the icon solution (or something similar) seems like the right way to go.  But without an official grayscale look coming out of WOTC, it’s up to us to invent the way we want to do it. Mongoose’s swirls definitely get some of it right, but overall theirs is not a visual language that really gels for me. Sure, I could consider something other than icons to do this job — grayscale powers entries could have different corner styles, borders, or shading — but speaking as the guy doing the layout work, I think all of those alternatives would work out to be some combination of “collossal pain in my ass” and “gaudy or otherwise visually muddled”.

So that leaves me thinking about icons (“dingbats”, if you prefer — the best approach would be to establish a font containing these designs).  And here, it’s best to think about a clear progression from at-will to daily — we’re talking trios of icons, not three icons living in isolation from one another.  The trick there is to figure out how to express the relationship among the three types of powers.  It could be measured by:

• Frequency – How often you get to use the power
• Magnitude – How “big” or “small” the power is relative to the other types
• Complexity – Daily powers might be represented as intricate, at-wills as simple
• Something else I’m not thinking of

So, here’s where Mongoose’s swirls get it right: they represent both frequency (number of swirls) and magnitude (size of each swirl).  So while the swirls don’t work for me as a final visual, they’re still working to express the relationship between power types in more than one way.  So it may simply be a matter of looking at finding the right geometric aesthetic to represent one power use (could be as simple as a diamond or star or circle).

One of the treatments I’ve done for this so far uses a “starburst” icon, stacking three small ones in a pyramid shape for at-will, two slightly larger ones in a column for encounter, and one fat one for a daily.  It works pretty well, but I’m not yet sold on it as the final idea.

That said, there’s nothing to suggest that we must hit more than one of that list for our visual language.  Another possible contender would be to simply focus on magnitude, and play around with moon-phases: crescent moon for an at-will, half-moon for an encounter, full moon for a daily.

What’s your preference for a visual, color-agnostic representation of these things?

1. Daniel M. Perez, March 11, 2009:

   Icons work best for me as well. While I can scan for keywords pretty good (thank you English Lit degree), the icons win in that dept as they stand out precisely because they aren’t letters. I kinda like the concept of the starbursts you mention. The moons, at least in my mind’s eye visualization, wouldn’t be as clear. You could use swords as well, in the same numeric progression as the starbursts.

2. Sasha Bilton, March 11, 2009:

   Would you open-source symbols if you went that route?

3. Nephlm, March 11, 2009:

   I like the icon ideas, but I think any icon scheme that you choose should contain the frequency element. The phases of the moon doesn’t feel very intuitive. There should be a changing number of things in the icon because it is the most obvious ways the different types of power relate to each other.

   I second that it would be nice if there was an open source or creative commons defacto standard or if need be small set of standards for this.

4. justin, March 11, 2009:

   @Daniel: Swords is a neat idea. My only concern is any sort of subtle confusion relating to the existing attack type icons, e.g., melee and melee basic.

   @Sasha: Great idea! Yes, I’m sure we would in keeping with our philosophy of creating an open environment that runs parallel to but does not directly compete with the GSL. (See, Gods.)

5. fred, March 11, 2009:

   I will almost certainly make the font publicly available and free of charge or restriction, once I settle on the right iconography.

   Hmmm, I wonder — it might be interesting to consider TWO kinds of icon sets: one using the swords (pointing left to right instead of up to down like the attack icons) for attack powers, another using something else for utility powers. But that might be too much pain.

6. Sasha Bilton, March 11, 2009:

   My pennies-worth would be to keep the same symbol set for all power types. I do like the pyramid stacking idea and the starburst is just fine. Also, skulls might be fun, but possibly too complex at such a small scale. Open hands, which was my other thought, might also be too difficult at scale.

   I’d really like to use a common cross-company set for Axe Initiative stuff, so making it open source would be awesome.

7. rob, March 11, 2009:

   Clearly, the answer that gets you both awesomeness and a differing number of points is SWORDCHUCKS!

   -Rob D.

8. fred, March 11, 2009:

   I’m not settled on the icon itself, but the arrangement’s looking something like this right now:

   

9. Pol Jackson, March 11, 2009:

   How about that arrangement, but use clock faces? Random times for the “At-Will”, 3 and 9 o’clock for the “Encounter”, and “five minutes ’til midnight” for “Daily”. The idea being, At-Wills are done whenever, Encounters are done less often, and Dailies are saved for the endgame.

   Just a pre-caffine thought.

10. Matthew J Hanson, March 11, 2009:

    I still like colors, but in black and white, they could be black, white, and gray. Black of course would be daily. I’d lean towards white for daily and gray for encounter.

11. Sasha Bilton, March 11, 2009:

    I think the barbs need to be thickened a little because of the size of the at-will icons

12. fred, March 11, 2009:

    Yeah, I agree about the barbs, Sasha. Like I said, the basic geometry of the icon isn’t settled yet.

    Pol — I had the same thought, but hands on the clock come out REALLY tiny when you’re doing them as roughly 14 to 16 point font dingbats.

    Matt — I might do that *too*, but I feel like that doesn’t quite do it for me by itself. You also create some “disunity” in the presentation, as the text on the darker backgrounds needs to be white, while the text on the white background needs to be black (whereas the current gig with all of the color equivalents is white text on a colored background).

13. NMcCoy, March 11, 2009:

    Several different collectible games I know of (I think it started with Pokemon) use a circle, a diamond, and a star for “common”, “uncommon”, and “rare” respectively. This seems to map very readily onto power distribution, encompasses both the “simplicity” and “significance” criteria, and would offer an easy mapping for those familiar with such games. You could add a shading element as well to pick up on the “color weight” of existing power headers – the circle would be hollow, diamond could have nested diamonds inside it, and star would be solid black.

14. fred, March 11, 2009:

    Not bad, NMcCoy! I’ll chew on that for sure — shrinking down an already small icon to half its height to compose the At-Will is definitely proving frustrating.

15. fred, March 11, 2009:

    Playing off NMcCoy’s suggestion, I’m looking at something like this now:

    

    These resize down to “font height” nicely, and I think they present a clear progression. Also, the Daily icon (on the right) resembles a sun, which fits into the “Day” concept of Daily pretty well. Here’s a more size-appropriate representation:

    

16. Jonathan Walton, March 11, 2009:

    Nice, Fred!

17. Ben, March 11, 2009:

    I think the circle / diamond / sun progression works very nicely. Good progression of complexity while keeping it readable at the small size.

18. Harald Wagener, March 12, 2009:

    I’d makew the diamond something more shield-like, which conveys “encounter” better for me than the abstract diamond. Love the circle and sun, though.

19. fred, March 12, 2009:

    Hmmm, shield. Okay. I’ll tinker.

20. fred, March 12, 2009:

    I’m not liking the way the shield ends up looking … but I’d agree the diamond is the least satisfying of the three. Will have to play with it some more.

21. NMcCoy, March 12, 2009:

    Here’s my tinkering:

    Now the circle’s looking a bit dull.

22. NMcCoy, March 12, 2009:

    Whoops, it ate my image? Here: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/381295/egg_symbols.png

23. Cam Banks, March 12, 2009:

    How about Circle, Triangle (pointed down), Star?