❖ Version History ❖

1st of July – 1st of October 2021
From the very beginning of July to the beginning of October an enormous amount of things happened, both for The Great Chase and for Calendra. In this timeline, The Great Chase had its amazing Kickstarter campaign, we finalized our file suite, and sent it over seas to be manufactured. In this same timeline, I tackled the process of updating every single other card of Calendra to meet the same specs from the Will o Wisp card as discussed in our previous chapter of The Design Journal.

Now, covering everything that happened in the card changes is a lot to explain visually, and rather than tackle it all in one big journal entry here, I have decided to break this whole section into a few posts that all share the same timeline of dates. This allows us to really investigate some of the intricate details of what took place without needing to stress about individual days that these ideas came along, because this whole process was developed for the Will-o-Wisp card and simply needed to be applied to the rest of the set.

But that’s enough introduction. Without further ado, lets take a look at some of what happened here step by step.

To begin, the very first and most important aspect that had been introduced to the aesthetics of Calendra from where it stood exactly one year prior was the concept of textured color designs. During the development of The Great Chase, I had learned a very cool trick for implementing a texture into my color pallets while creating the map cards. I wanted to translate this same concept into the Calendra cards, but there are two ways that I yearned for this to happen. The first of those methods is what we will cover in today’s post.

Before you read on, first take another look at the image featured up above in this post. What you will see as the most significant difference from the previous designs is this almost blurry texture that has been added into the background of the entire card. This texture is actually the image of a wood grain that has been placed behind all of the layers of frame design and color, so that the quality of the text, frame, and color remain in tact, but the background appears far more detailed.

But…

This particular woodgrain texture is not actually the one we want to use for the background of these cards. It features a bit too much blur detail, and it is distracting from the aspects of the card we want the user to focus on. In stead, this texture is placed where it is in the art file because we are about to use it for generating some new colors into a few very particular spots throughout the rest of the design. Which spots you ask? Well, what I want for the final look here is to achieve the color and texture of woodgrain within the lettering, symbols, and graphics throughout the rest of the card without losing the look and coloration of the rest of the design, in essence, we are striving to achieve this final look:

As you can clearly see from the example image above, there is a beautiful and subtle coloration that has been added within the letters of “Ferric” within the number “2” within the symbol to the top left corner, and even within the entirety of the “Celtic Knots”. This color pallet was achieved using a few different techniques of editing… but it all originated with the color and texture of the woodgrain that was laced into the design as shown in the featured image of this post.

And!

This is not the only way that this texture was used in an amazing way. Now that you’ve had a moment to see how it was implemented into the letters, symbols, and numbers above, look at this next image and see if you can tell what happened next:

As you can see in the super unfortunately blurry image above here now, there is one other unique detail to what has happened to the art in this phase: The magical looking glow behind the main rune symbol. To acquire this glow, we also utilized the power of the woodgrain… but in a totally different way than we had used to get the text to change everywhere else. This outcome was achieved using the woodgrain texture to capture the shape and size of the rune, but was then blurred and distorted in a variety of ways to keep the color changes through the glow (which looks magnificent by comparison to just having it be a white glow in the background, trust me, I did both just to check).

Using these two strategies with the first of our wood grain textures was a key aspect to developing a better looking design in extremely simple ways. Unfortunately, this same strategy had to be recreated 120 times in order to achieve the same look uniformly across the whole set of cards, and so that was the first phase of what I had done through the Fall of 2021.

However, this is not the end of our visiting the concept of woodgrain textured designs, so be sure to check back in on our next chapter of The Design Journal to see what happened next!