Feedback: New info card

[TonyLB]

A year ago, for DexCon, I got myself together sufficietly to put together a tri-fold pamphlet of information for people about Capes.  Printed a hundred on my home laser printer, on pastel paper and everything.

>sigh<  They flopped.  I've carried the darn things to many, many conventions, and there are still tons of them.  That means they have not gone anywhere much, have not helped very many people.

Lesser (smarter!) men might take this as a sign that I should concentrate my efforts on making face-to-face contact and instilling my personal enthusiasm.  But not me!  For me the complete failure of a tactic means that it needs more effort invested in it.  I got a gander at Luke Crane's very spectacular Burning Wheel postcards, and I've since been inspired to work with OvernightPrints (on another project).  I really like the quality, so I'm planning to swap out my old loser-pamphlets for new (possibly also loserish) postcards.

So, as always, more eyeballs means less mistakes and/or raw stupidity.  Help me out!  Front and Back images (low-res) are online.

Does the background of little comic-panels distract too much?  It's striking me as a little "Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat" when I stare at it hard, but my hope is that when you're not staring at it hard, it will just blend into the background.

Also, on the text (back only) am I saying too much?  Too little?  The wrong things?

[Vaxalon]

Looks about right to me.

Who are you going to mail them to?

[Andrew Cooper]

This probably completely non-helpful but I love it just as it is.  The only thing it lacks is the sharks with lasers that are on the actual book cover.

[TonyLB]

Hadn't considered mailing them to people.  That's a thought.

It's mostly "postcard-sized" rather than post-cards per se (though, certainly, I think a lot of people who use this printing service do print actual post-cards).  I was mostly thinking of using them to replace the current tri-fold pamphlets ... handing them to people directly, and leaving them sitting out on tables at conventions.

Though ... I suppose one could theoretically talk to DexCon about getting the cards included in people's registration packets.  But that's a lot of cards, and I wonder whether it would be cost-effective.

[Hans]

OK, I will be the one to harsh your mellow, Tony.  Blunt feedback follows.  From front to back...

* The superheroine on the front has no pupils...it freaks me out.  Her eyes follow me around the room. 

* The URL on the front should be in the same comic book font, not in the "Matrix" like font it is currently in.

* It is too pastel for me.  Others may groove on pastel, but I am not one of them.  I would think more vibrant primary colours would be more "comic booky".  Its too bad there aren't any comics in the public domain, because it would be really cool if the backdrop were an actual page from a comic book, toned down so that the printing is clear and legible over the top of it.  But it is doubtful there is a source of an actual comic book page that could be used for that purpose, and you probably don't have the time to create one.

* I think it would look more "comic booky" if the panels were separated by thinner strips of white, instead of slightly thicker strips of blue.  One illustration of some sort in a panel on the back, preferably an illustration framed as an actual comic book panel, wouldn't go amiss either.  Getting rid of the blue between the panels would go a long way to reducing the overall pastelness. 

* It seems strange to me that in an advertisement intended for gaming literate people (at a convention), no mention of the gm-less/gm-full nature of the game is made.  It is certainly a point of distinction, perhaps THE point of distinction, between Capes and every other supers RPG (and frankly most RPG's in general).  Not every game is going to experience a "Net of social connections", although the exemplar system is also a selling point, but every game WILL experience the profound equality of players that comes with no GM (or everyone a GM).

* It should mention price, format, and where it is available for purchase.  I think the price, especially for the PDF, is a selling point; it certainly was for me.

* The heading "conflict is conflict" doesn't really make any sense to me, compared to the text that follows.  Based on text, something like "Conflict, not Physics" or "Story over Physics" or something along those lines would be better.

* "Click and Lock characters" is meaningful to those that have played the game, but to those that haven't, perhaps the heading "Characters, fast!" or something like that, with a mention of the name of the system within the text ("Using the Click and Lock (TM) system...") would be better.

* and lastly, one very minor thing; it should probably be all both sides justified, or all left side justified.  The mix seems a tad odd to me, especially in the top paragrah where the last line just sort of hangs out in the middle while nothing else in the page is center aligned.

[Eric Sedlacek]

Technically, you should have a comma after "auditors" in the second paragraph under "Conflict is Conflict", but that could mess up your layout.  There is also the whole issue over whether or not "archvillain" should be hyphenated, but that could go either way.

[Thunder_God]

You should mention that the game is all about conflict, between the players.

Change the font on Ken's piece, it annoys the eye.

[TonyLB]

Cool!  Thanks for the feedback!  New Front and Back.

Most advice I just flat out took.  Here's my reasoning on the bits I didn't:

• The superheroine isn't supposed to have pupils.  I'm an X-Men fan from way back.
• Pricing ... ugh.  I'm torn on that one.  Do I want to draw in people who say "Wow, it's cheap!" first and only "Wow, it's cool!" later?  I probably should want to draw them in, but emotionally ... and no offense to anyone who was drawn in that way ... the notion doesn't thrill me.
• Given how I've seen "Player conflict!  Neat, huh?" misinterpreted to mean "This is a game for assholes" on ... well ... pretty much every RPG.Net thread where I've expressed a fondness for player-vs-player conflict I don't think that's necessarily the best tack for communicating what makes the game so neat.

And finally the pastels.  I'm interested to see how people see them now.  The changes have been very subtle on my screen, and I think that down in these color ranges there is a wide disparity between how screens show things (for instance, Hans sees the bars on the old images as blue rather than grey, etc.)  I've switched over to watered down versions of the pure Pantone primary colors ... which still come across as pastels, but that's because, fundamentally, really watered down pure red is pink, and so on and so forth.

My main concern was not so much with the idea of pastels as a concept, as with the idea of the multicolored tile background, and whether the differences in tile color produced too "noisy" a background.  Looking at it again today, I'm not personally seeing that as a problem.

[Andrew Cooper]

Hans (and the others) were right.  The color changes make this one better.  That's the biggest difference, I think.  The non-pastel colors make it pop a little more and that's cool.

[dunlaing]

If it were me, I would move the box with Ken Hite's comment to the right side of the page, with the red box to the left of it. I think you should at least try a version with white gutters to see if it looks better.

I wouldn't worry about the colors though. They won't look like that when printed. If you're really working from Pantone swatches, though, you should use the Pantone process swatches, not the Pantone spot swatches, since this will no doubt be printed in CMYK process.

[Hans]

The superheroine isn't supposed to have pupils.  I'm an X-Men fan from way back.

I get it, supposed to be a Storm thing.  Fair enough.  She still creeps me out, but if you made her African with white hair in a mohawk, she probably wouldn't, so there you go.  Different strokes...

Otherwise, I think these are an improvement over the first set.  The colour change from blue/grey in the strips makes the colours in the panels look much nicer, even if you didn't change them much.  It is more of a contrast.  Especially on the front, the white strips make for a better background to the creepy chick.

One change I would make is the "No GM? Or one?  Or Many?" heading.  It doesn't really match up with the text below it.  The old heading ("Entertaining by Design") was was better for that text (although it doesn't make my heart sing).  I still think there should be an ADDITIONAL blurb about the player equality of Capes, but you may be running out of space and not want to replace any of your existing blurbs, which is fair enough.

Another idea...center the text in each panel on the back within its panel, not with relation to the whole page.  Note how the left hand side of the middle left panel has a significant margin, but the left hand side of the right hand panels have almost no margin.  I think it would be better if there was just a consistent padding within each panel.

On the pricing/availability: I don't think it is quite a matter of drawing in people first on how cheap it is, it is more a matter of "Look how freaking cool this is!  And you can get for $10!"  But I get where you are coming from.  You still may want to mention that it is available both in print (if it still is available in print) and PDF formats, even if you don't get into price.

[Sydney Freedberg]

It's hard to read this in the low-res version, but are your archvillains "threatening to steel your girlfriend" rather than to "steal" her?

[Andrew Morris]

Nope. It's spelled correctly.

[Sindyr]

It's hard to read this in the low-res version, but are your archvillains "threatening to steel your girlfriend" rather than to "steal" her?

Well, if the arch-villains had the Power of Metal, maybe they could "steel" her.

(grin)