❖ Version History ❖

3rd of July, 2020
After creating the basic card outline and getting the font created for Calendra, I send out for a few small samples to see how everything looks on the cards themselves when in a printed format. My goals here are to check for a couple of key ingredients and see where the cards need to be improved. My checklist for this phase of the design look like this:

1.Color: How to the colors appear on the card? Are they too bright, too dark? Are they allowing the text and symbols to come across?

2. Texture: How do the textures used in the background affect the outcome of the appearance and color of the card? Do they need to be adjusted up or down to help clean the look up at all?

3. Text: How does the Text look and feel? are the letters too small, too big? Are the words clear and legible? Also, how do the symbols appear? Is everything okay with the way things are shaded?

I am very excited when the first package arrives, but much to my dismay, the cards look absolutely terrible. Unfortunately, almost everything that I had been expecting to check for wasn’t working, and it was a bit of a cascading issue. The Card texture came out far too dark, which made the coloration look terrible and hard to distinguish, and of course also made it nearly impossible to tell what the text and symbols even looked like on the surface.

With a heavy head, I knew that there was a lot of work to do, and I spend then next chunk of time reverting back to the non-textured design, which is pictured above. Starting with this problem I could help identify how much the color would need to be adjusted, but there was no where near enough information available to me about how the font and symbols appear on the card, because this first batch is almost entirely black.

On a positive note though, there is one strong step toward our finished aesthetic and theme for Calendra that is a great success. Up until this point in time, there have always been five suits: (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, and a 5th category that had never been named). It had been a long struggle to come up with a good term that could represent our fifth season in this game, but at long last Ben and I finally came to a conclusion that we both loved:

“Ferric”

We land on this name by first thinking the season that would best characterize a group of of rogue fairies hunting the other seasons of the year should stem from the concept of rust, which would be poisonous to the Fae. Turns out that “Ferric Oxide” is the latin term for this rusting process. We were particularly happy with the idea also because the term is a six letter word, just like all four of the other seasons.

Our next goal was to properly introduce it into the myths and thematic content of our story behind Calendra.