Thread by @RobertGReeve

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but chiefest among them is: don't be scared of white space. You are vinting delicious wine, and it needs air to breathe.

Art can go there, or sidebars. Or, most controversially, the bookkeeper can WRITE IN their own notes there. 1/x

https://twitter.com/MTBlack2567/status/1330385875012730881

When I started designing D&D books, I mimicked the two-column layout of existing WOTC texts. It worked for them, so why deviate?

But even WOTC wasn't perfect here, like, say... when they wrapped text around art in 3.5e. You cram in more words, but it's much less readable. 2/x

I leveled up when I read Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style. This is a must-read for all text designers. It explains and demonstrates. The work itself is an example of the craft. (This beautiful book is also set in the best of all possible fonts, Minion.) 3/x

This book goes beyond mere aesthetics. It talks about font pairings, page proportions, line spacing, kerning, how to organize headers and subheaders, and how to digitally organize text.

Readability. Usability. Efficiency.

4/x

I internalized it when I designed my campaign settings, which, GULP, I have never shared before. But here. (DM me or reply with thoughts. I put it in my WOTC portfolio when I applied for their design & editing jobs recently.)

dropbox.com/s/e63x8dqtdf8c…

5/x

I went for a single-column layout based on medieval manuscripts that Bringhurst highlighted in his text. I liked the room for marginalia... and for art. I used public domain art, but tried to curate it to give a cohesive feel -- the where, when, and how of my world. 6/x

I chose Brioso Pro as my main font because it was graceful, readable, and feature-rich. It had great special characters -- alternative capitals, diacritical marks, and oldstyle numerals that look great in the text body. (Save the lining figures for your tables and Excel.) 7/x

Aim for 66 characters per line for optimum readability (not a hard rule. Different fonts have different character widths, so choose a font carefully.) Shape the page. You are an artist and the text block is your sculpture.

behance.net/gallery/920037…

8/x

When I designed this book, sometimes I made the text take center stage. Sometimes, I made the art take it. 9/x

I edited the text to ensure that subsections did not roll onto page breaks, which sometimes meant more white space.

Sometimes it meant *a lot* of white space.

This is fine. Deliberate emptiness allows something else to stand out. 10/x

After establishing a pattern, I broke it. Late in the book, I stopped describing earthly cities, and began describing unknown reaches of the other planes.

The players knew the world from a previous campaign. The heavens and the hells? Totally new. I cultivated mystique.

11/x

No more white space. Text to a minimum. I traded out my mysterious NPC narrator for evocative quotes from real texts that captured the feel of these far-flung realms. 12/x

This book is a narrative device, not a reference text. I chose page proportions knowing that. This doesn't introduce new game design elements. It doesn't have homebrew classes, races, or feats.

This text is meant to inspire. To make my players curious to explore this world. 13/x

Anyway, this is my first big tweet thread, so I hope it was educational and inspiring. I'm trying to have more of a presence here in the twitter #TTRPGs after long-time lurking. And in the spirit of my concurrent first-ever watch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

14/14