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Asking for input: N4 book readability

Discussion in 'News' started by Varsovian, Sep 26, 2020.

  1. A Mão Esquerda

    A Mão Esquerda Deputy Hexahedron Officer

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    Industry standard seems fairly simple: does it sell, and is there enough positive feedback to continue in the same vein, and, as you mentioned, have laws and regulations remained the same? If so, onward. And that seems to be the case for game books overall.
     
  2. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    "If it ain't illegal it ain't wrong"?
     
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  3. Arschbombe

    Arschbombe Well-Known Member

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    I realize that you are the designated forum outrage troll whose sole purpose here is to express outrage on behalf of persecuted minorities of every possible flavor whether they've asked you to or not. With that realization I understand engaging with you on any topic remotely related to said outrage is a truly pointless endeavor that will achieve absolutely nothing. But here goes anyway...

    Again, as I posted before (and you did not acknowledge) I'm not talking about the publishing industry and the glorious tradition of the international order of typesetters. I'm talking about the gaming industry which is not a terribly professional business, lacks global standards and does not have long-standing traditions dating back 1500 years to the origins of chess. So kindly sheath your sword and dismount your destrier rampant.
     
  4. Nuada Airgetlam

    Nuada Airgetlam Nazis sod off ///

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    You're actually still persisting in telling somebody with over two decades of experience in working on gaming books and cooperating with digital typography and text processing professionals in that line of work that there are no standards in the industry and that it's somehow unprofessional and detached from general publishing standards and good practices? With no professional experience beyond being a consumer of a minute slice of the goods produced by said industry?

    And then you're telling them they're a troll? I'm sorry, but you're talking out of your Arsch.
     
  5. Arschbombe

    Arschbombe Well-Known Member

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    I don't care what credentials you say you have. I call it like I see it. In the wider publishing world I can see the standards of a titanic industry in practice. In gaming not so much.

    If there are standards in gaming, surely these are published somewhere, right? And we can then compare actual released products to said standards, right? What is the governing body that controls these standards? When and where do they meet? GenCon? Adepticon? Spielmesse Essen?
     
  6. MikeTheScrivener

    MikeTheScrivener O-12 Peace Kepper

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    Each individual company probably comes up with their own style book, complete with which fonts can and cant be used, how to treat the logo, which color blends are okay - when and where to use spot color vs lab vs cmyk blend - information on spacing, pretty much everything you can think of. after a company develops a piece in house they'll hand it off to a printer who can then mechanicalize it, spot any errors that wont work when you actually put the book together and fix it.
    To say there are some type of universal laws for printing is misleading, there are general practices that everyone follows but each company will deviate a bit in their own way. to reiterate, I think CB's spacing is a bit wide, and creates alot of white space which can be hard on the eyes, but I don't think the font is all too small.
     
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  7. Nuada Airgetlam

    Nuada Airgetlam Nazis sod off ///

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    Yeah, it's been pretty clear for a while already that you're not speaking from any kind of experience or knowledge, or respect of those.

    Go ahead and tell Fantasy Flight Games, Wizards, Games Workshop and other titans who annually release thousands of books and board games in dozens of styles that there are no standards or good practices in DTP and layout / design. Go on, I'll laugh with them at you.

    Actually - yes! If you weren't proudly speaking from the high horse of ignorance, you would already have at least googled "typography" and found out what huge body of science and knowledge it is. And, yes again! Those publishers do meet on these conventions, they do talk to each other, they do observe what others publish and how, they do learn new tricks, styles, trends and fashions in typography and layout from each other. As well as game design, themes, art direction and other building blocks of their products. DTP / layout is one of those important blocks, for all serious companies.

    For somebody at the very least moderately connected to the actual industry it is painfully clear that CB layout specialists and graphical designers are either out of such loop and not very much interested in making their product look modern and legible enough, or they are not skilled enough. Maybe CB can't afford to hire people with greater skill or to train them to be better, I have no clue.

    For all I know, they are guys and gals who love their game, love the product, do their best and this is the result we have. Despite their best effort and intentions it still might not measure up to what is considered best practices and industry standards. One does not necessarily detract from the other - while still being a fact.

    And you don't think there is an external general body of knowledge that these internal guidebooks are based on?

    Not laws, there are standards in typography. This is a huge body of science and knowledge, one you can study and get proficient in, that you can read books upon, etc. - science. For example, what I would call "reading ergonomics" (some of the stuff you mention - font choice, serif or sans, column width and count, proportion of columns to white space, paragraph indentation and spacing, line spacing, font kerning, font colors, font backgrounds, etc.), the "best practices" of which have been broken here and caused the original user complaints.

    Of course every company vibes and riffs off those generalized standards, because they are creating styles. However, once created those styles can be judged on how easy to read and how artistically beautiful they are. If a style is hard to read and/or ugly, the fonts are too small, the paragraphs are misshapen, the pages are poorly formatted, the white space is not used well, the colors and palettes clash, the backgrounds of the text make it even harder to read, etc - this means that said word is what? Below industry standards.

    It's as if you said "a chair is a chair, there are no standards as far as making chairs is concerned, everyone just does their own thing". Yeah, sure, you can buy chairs from companies who never heard of or cared for ergonomics, or their designers weren't skilled enough to pull off a very comfortable office chair. And your back will hurt and you will complain. Just like these books do not read comfortably, our eyes hurt and we complain.
     
    #107 Nuada Airgetlam, Oct 16, 2020
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2020
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  8. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    As much as this ship has sailed and that there is little turning back as the physical product is already out, I think the least CB actually needs is you guys white knighting them. Hopefully CB is aware of the best practice in this legitimate field of research (like really, there's actual money to be had from researching what you can get away with while maintaining a product that looks good and reads well) but did some conscious choices that we may or may not agree with.

    This thread is for those who have problems reading the books, not those of us who don't. Yet. After all, we all grow old and our vision with it eventually if we can avoid an early demise.
     
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  9. Vocenoctum

    Vocenoctum Well-Known Member

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    It's wierd to me, since I haven't gotten the books yet, how little discussion there has been on the actual fluff. I guess some might be going on in the specific forums for certain factions that I haven't seen or maybe I just missed some threads somewhere.
     
  10. Mahtamori

    Mahtamori Well-Known Member

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    From what I understand a large amount of it is repeats from previous editions. I don't read it myself, because bad writing (that other people have insisted was good) has ruined game settings for me before.
     
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  11. Varsovian

    Varsovian Well-Known Member

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    By "industry standard", I meant: industry average. And I stand by my observation that N4 has the tiniest font I've ever seen in such a product.

    Honestly, choose a game line: New World of Darkness? GURPS? Mutants & Masterminds? Savage Worlds? Call of Cthulhu? Modiphius' Conan? Kult? Monte Cook's Numenera / The Strange / Cypher? Legend of Five Rings? GW's Age of Sigmar / WH40K / related games? Pick a name and I'll snap some photos. You'll see any of these books has bigger font than N4...

    There might not be any legally-binding rules, but Nuada is right that there are some established good practices and knowledge related to typography. Like serif fonts being considered easier on the eyes for scientific reasons...

    It varies. The main N3 book is perfectly fine. HSN3 started the unfortunate trend of CB using a smaller font, which I find unpleasant to read. But even that small font is more legible for me than what was done in N4...
     
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  12. Vocenoctum

    Vocenoctum Well-Known Member

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    Er, so what IS the default standard for game books then? What font style & size have they all agreed on and are these default assumptions available? Certainly Wizards has their style, and GW has their style, but they fluctuate within their own books and certainly do not share the same between them.

    For CB, I think Daedalus' Fall, Uprising, Third Offensive are much better presentation than N3/HS, and also think Operation Wildfire's booklet was better layout/ presentation than Operation Kaldstrom. It's possible that they had an editor/ layout company doing them, but then with COVID had to go more in house.

    It's also possible they just needed to keep the books under a certain size and made the font smaller to fit more in.
     
  13. Vocenoctum

    Vocenoctum Well-Known Member

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    I figured the basics were retreading the 175 years to N3, but haven't seen any mention of the 5 years to N4 from N3. Not a huge thing, but just seemed odd.
     
  14. Varsovian

    Varsovian Well-Known Member

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    Eh, I'd say it's because of CB not having done anything that outrageous there. From what I've managed to read, N4 more or less codifies the present state of the fluff, most of which we've already known. It's not another Uprising-like book dropping huge new developments on us...
     
  15. Nuada Airgetlam

    Nuada Airgetlam Nazis sod off ///

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    You're confusing two different things - standards and styles. Standards are "don't use dark gray background for black text" or "don't make line separation too small", or "indent your paragraphs", or "either hyphenate the column (but don't leave so-called 'orphans' and 'widows', lone syllables in a line) or justify it, but do not leave it as is".

    Styles are font choices, color choices, art choices, backgrounds, etc. - styles are supposed to conform to and be based on standards. Deviate from them where it's artistically called for and does not preclude legibility to a broad spectrum of readers.

    Standards are "ergonomics tell you how to make a comfortable chair for a median human of undetermined sex". Styles are "I want to make a cool gamer chair" or "I want to make a slick CEO's office chair". Style needs to conform to those underlying standards or your back will hurt, whether you're Shroud or Elon Musk.

    I've said before, this does not check out at all. They left a lot of white space in columns. Each page has at least a paragraph's size of empty space that does not have underlying art to warrant that area not containing text. Some pages are 1/3rd empty in this way. No, space was most definitely not of consideration here.

    That's one of the points I'm trying to make here. A knowledgeable and skilled DTP specialist would've done way more with text layout and formatting that the mere equivalent of switching text to "two columns" in Word and slapping page breaks wherever a given part of rules ends and a new page seems to begin.

    I mean, honestly, that's how bad it looks if you know what you're looking for. No visible attempt at kerning, justifying or hyphenating the text, no tricks in making the best use of page space, nothing. Just simply "drop a bucket of paragraphs into a page, see how many fit, next page, do the same over and over" and then done titles and headers, called it a day.

    Small wonder it doesn't read well.
     
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  16. wes-o-matic

    wes-o-matic feeelthy casual

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    I finally got my copy of the physical books and had a chance to sit down and compare them to each other and to other gaming books I have on the shelf. Some of my take-aways, as someone working in both print and digital design/comms for a couple decades:

    Yeah, the body copy on these is small, even by gaming industry standards, but not in an unprecedented way. Most of my gaming books use slightly larger typefaces, mostly in the ~10–11 pt range for body text. However, my old Dream Pod 9 books for Heavy Gear feature small type similar to the N4 books, and they have similar issues with legibility compared to their contemporaries.

    The two N4 book layouts are difficult to compare side-by-side because the fluff book is formatted for long-form reading and has a much smoother, more polished-looking layout with overall good use of images to add visual interest and take up excess space on the pages. By comparison, the rulebook layout is fairly fragmented. Part of that's unavoidable—when you have that many short paragraphs, headings, sub-headings, sub-sub-headings, call-out boxes, lists, and diagrams crammed into any given two-page spread, things are going to come together..."irregularly" is probably the best word.

    There are definitely some issues I wish had been handled better, but overall the production value on these is at the higher end of "OK" by game book standards as I understand them. I've seen way worse, for comparable price points. That said, I do have a list of problems and nitpicks, a lot of which have been mentioned by others here. Something I haven't seen brought up is the large number of widows and orphans in the N4 rulebook—instances of a paragraph wrapping such that the last word appears on its own line—which is generally kind of a rookie goof/sign of inattention in print layouts. Also, for some reason the bulleted lists in the Effects/Cancellation text all have in-bullet leading that matches the spacing between bullets, instead of having each bullet get some more vertical space before the next one appears to help distinguish them.

    I actually think the bigger legibility issue of the fluff book is probably down to something rather silly: The typeface for the body text looks the same in both the rules and the fluff book. This is an issue because the typeface was probably chosen with the rulebook in mind, where it works OK for short-form reading or display on a screen, but it's not great for long-form reading in the fluff book. I get the impression the fluff book's design was handled by someone who doesn't do a lot of reading physical proofs before sending the files to print. I say that because:
    • The line weights and colors chosen for small-size accent text (footnotes, monospaced text representing "digital" communication transcripts, and quotations in orange call-out boxes) are very light compared to the body text, and lose legibility at small size due to low contrast, both from the thin strokes on the characters and the lower color contrast between their colors and the background fills behind them. This is the kind of mistake that can be harder to distinguish on screen but shows up in a printed proof.
    • The body text is set in a typeface that is compact and legible at small point sizes, but if you scale it up to more typical reading sizes around 10–11 pts. it appears semi-bold instead of regular weight. It reads well digitally (see the PDF) and in short bursts typical of referencing a specific rule in a book. The heavier line weights compensate somewhat for the small type size, which probably gives the designer the impression that it's sufficiently legible. However, it has relatively uniform stroke widths, which is typical for digital-first and display typefaces, and "legible at small size" doesn't inherently translate to "comfortable for extended reading."
    I think the fluff book needed to have been set in a slightly larger typeface with slightly lighter and more varied line weights in the glyphs. I suspect that tightening up the leading (spacing between lines) a tad would combine with the reduction in character width when switching from a heavier to a slightly lighter typeface, and the result would have been similar overall paragraph dimensions and page count while bumping legibility and reading comfort up. I also think the specialized accent text needed to either be larger, or heavier, or darker, or some combination of those three types of adjustment to make it more legible.

    Knowing why some fonts work for screen, some for print, and some for either is an important design skill, but it's one that gets missed a lot, especially as designers move more into an all-digital production world where the end goal is display on a screen. And knowing that typefaces that are suited for short-form reading may break a long-form reader's flow goes right along with that.

    EDIT: Ninja'd by Nuada regarding widows & orphans in the rulebook.
     
    #116 wes-o-matic, Oct 16, 2020
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2020
  17. psychoticstorm

    psychoticstorm Aleph's rogue child
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    Personally I and CB are watching this thread, but as I am obliged to tell, commenting has more impact if it is polite and you can say anything negative in a polite and constructive way.

    Thanks to those that do so in this thread.
     
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  18. Varsovian

    Varsovian Well-Known Member

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    Thanks for tuning in, @psychoticstorm . It's good to know that the thread got noticed by CB. And yeah, people - please, take note re: civility.

    @psychoticstorm - as CB are watching the thread, then is there any chance of a PDF version of the books? I'll pay...
     
  19. Arschbombe

    Arschbombe Well-Known Member

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    It's not the tiniest font I've seen, but I agree that it's smaller than average.

    I was going to do the same with Avalon Hill, TSR, FASA, GDW, ICE, Devil Pig Games, FFG, Steve Jackson Games, and Wizards et al products to show that N4 is not a uniquely bad rulebook. But that wouldn't address the core problem anyway, which is that you have difficulty reading it. So I'm tapping out.
     
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  20. Lucian

    Lucian Catgirl Nation

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    Huh. I always wondered why it was so hard for me to read infinity fluff books. Always quickly made me tired and sleepy for some reason. Never thought it could be the font, but yeah, seems plausable. Just got N4 book, it's so small and letters so tightly packed that it becomes uncomfortable. Modiphius books feel much easier to read in my opinion.

    And then I got to this part. Page 12-ish and book already setting the right mood :unamused:
    [​IMG]
    Well, maybe they should go all digital first and print physical books later. After some community proofreading.
     
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