Andrew Medeiros, you mentioned you were terrible at setting up the design, but so far even under my professional opinion I think you do a fine job with the overall layout. None of text is too compact or tight, rather though you may want to give the page a slightly bigger margin for printer use. So, let’s work on the things that do need to be cleaned up.
1. I would go with a simple Garamond or Times Roman … will give it a newspaper feel which I think works really well for this genre. If you want a more modern feel, you could go Gills sans or Verdana.
2. For the headers, look at these:
Love this font, little old, little new, little decorative
http://www.dafont.com/quiet-the-thief.font
For an older feel
http://www.dafont.com/old-london.font
http://www.dafont.com/seagram-tfb.font
Modern and straight
http://www.dafont.com/evil-dead.font
Do you want the etched layout for the images? For me, I see where you are going but it looks obviously photoshopped. I personally like the AW black and whites, but I am guessing people may be getting a little sick of that. If you want, send me a photo used and I will B&W it up for you to judge.
When I was doing ‘hood I found that you almost needed a few photos as some that you thought would work might fail miserably in the conversion and being inverted.
Those are some gorgeous fonts Tommy, you sure do know your stuff. I would have a hard time increasing margins and still fitting in all the text. Would you suggest if I did this that I should also reduce the font size on the main body text? I’d had to lose ease of reading.
What is the current font size? Have you decreased it and actually printed it? It all looks small on screen. I would say, go no smaller than 8 for your smallest font and 10 for your regular fonts.
This is why I have fell in love with the legal size trifolds that AW puts their stuff on.
Tell me if this works, but depends on final layout size.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9Hhx1yXlz-OMHpIaThzZ1RyTEU/edit?usp=sharing
Right now the body font is 9 with a few title fonts at 11-23. Tri-folds are incredible, I love how much space they give you. I may very well spend some time converting my playbooks to that format in the coming weeks.
Your example is incredible! Looks sooo good! If it’s easier, I can send the unmodified pictures too.