So I was wondering, what program do you guys use to make your Skins all beautiful and official-looking?

So I was wondering, what program do you guys use to make your Skins all beautiful and official-looking?

So I was wondering, what program do you guys use to make your Skins all beautiful and official-looking?

18 thoughts on “So I was wondering, what program do you guys use to make your Skins all beautiful and official-looking?”

  3. Pages is mac’s word processor. I find it more versatile than word. Indesign is an adobe program for layout management and design. Illustrator is adobe’s drawing program more or less

  6. Honestly, I feel like Pages is closer to InDesign than a word processor. MS Word is about getting words into a document – it’s a typewriter that’s had feature creep for tons of layout options. It doesn’t do layout well but it can do rudiments. Microsoft used to put out Publisher, which was all about page layout but terrible for typing. Pages is a bit better for typing than Publisher but is much more oriented toward layout and print than writing.

  8. I did my Master’s thesis in Google Docs, which by the end I realized was a terrible mistake. But anyway.

    Hmm, these are all super expensive. I wonder if the version of Word I have has anything I can use. I vaguely recall McDaldno saying somewhere he did the portraits on the Skins in Illustrator.

    What is the header font used in the Skins? The body text font looks like…Calibri, maybe?

  11. I used a program called scribus to make my AW playbooks. I made a lot of custom boxes and graphics for the playbooks just using MS Paint and (not including making the artwork) it only takes about an hour to make a single  playbook.

    Examples of my work:

    Boy & His Dog = https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9cu0IVYfHtiY3I0Z0lnU3hxWGM/edit

    the Heralds of Hell = https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9cu0IVYfHtiOUM4VWtUTlByREk/edit

    Synthetic = https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9cu0IVYfHtiVnExMmZKa29ORnc/edit

  12. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and In Design.None of which are cheap, unfortunately.

    To get the image looking like an official Skin, open it in Photoshop and play with the contrast a bit. Then open it in Illustrator and use Live Trace. Play with the Live Trace settings until you get something you like.

    I made an In Design document the same size as the official Skins, downloaded the same fonts (which are free and called out in the Monsterhearts book), and used a real Skin as a template. That way I could get the type sizes, lines, and boxed exact.

    I’m a bit anal retentive like that. 😛

  13. Scribus and GIMP, meanwhile, are both free and can make decent looking playbooks. You won’t get fancy features like embedding text or bookmarking a link into the pdf, but if you’re just making skins then you don’t need those fancy features.

  15. Going to keep your kind offer in mind, Christopher Stone-Bush 😉 I have three Skins in draft format (I’ve posted the first to story-games.com) and though I’ve downloaded Scribus in anticipation of that, the learning curve can be awful on a new program.

  16. Thank you all for your advice. I am downloading Scribus now, and shall see how that goes. It may be possible that I cock this up completely. But, no use not trying.

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