Mimicking WotC's layout design, fonts, etc. . .

[BlindOgre]

The first one is definitely his; I work with fonts all day long and, while I'm not a complete font guru, I could spot the differences right off. (It also helps that I'd already located the correct fonts and have been tinkering with my own project, and have been staring at then for several weeks.) The biggest difference is that the flavor text for the power in the PHB is actually Mentor Italic, not Mentor Sans Italic; look at the lower-case "g" characters and you'll see the difference.

As for the four-pointed star it's Unicode character U+2726 ( HTML entity દ ) -- I'm not sure if there's a keyboard shortcut to get it, but you should be able to find it in a character palette app; Mac OS X has one accessible from the International control panel, but I don't know where the Windows one is. I can tell you that the OpenType versions of Mentor Sans and Mentor Standard have that character glyph, as I don't use Zapf Dingbats in my project.

When pasting from the PHB PDF, the diamond comes identifies as ZapfDingbats. Other fonts may have similar glyphs.

With the correct italic and closer font sizing and spacing, the difference gets a little tougher to tell:

I got the Mentor Sans and Mentor Italic fonts from fonts.com. $39 each.

BTW, the jpg conversion of these colors may be a bit off. I picked up the original RGB from the release PDF of the PHB.

 

[BlindOgre]

However, I recommend picking your own fonts. Making an exact copy of what WOTC's already done is less impressive than doing something of your own and making it conform to more general guidelines of usability and attractiveness. (Personally, it doesn't impress me one bit, but I readily admit to being a corner case in the matter.)

2) Well, black would be black of course. In the image posted, the RGB values for the red are 132, 32, 45. The brownish color is a gradient ramp from 191, 190, 170 (on the left) to white (on the right).

But again, why not pick your own colors? As long as you're in the same general neighborhood as WOTC (for the header bars -- that is, as long as you have easy-to-identify "red," "green," and "black") you should be fine; you can do something different with the gradient ramps (make it solid? make it a tint of the header bar color? make a subtle pattern of some kind? go with divider lines instead?) that might help make it "your own" design rather than "yet another copy of WOTC's" design.

In short, I recommend you show us what *you* can do; we already know what WOTC did.

Actually, the red/green/black I picked were from the PHB PDF. Doing a dead copy is an exercise, more or less, to first establish that I could reproduce their style and with such a baseline established, branch away until I find something that is both recognizable in format, yet somewhat distinct in style.

 

[BlindOgre]

Sampled directly from the leaked pdf, the power heading colors are as follows:
at-will: R 91; G 143; B 98
encounter: R 129; G 28; B 50 (very close to what Marius Delphus posted in post 14; not sure where the disparity is here or who's 'right')
daily: R 65; G 67; B 66 — That's a light enough gray that I can't imagine they meant for it to be completely black at any point. It's also interesting [to me] that it isn't a strict gray, but instead has a little extra blue and green.

And BlindOgre, thanks for the correction on the diamond! I just spliced that character into my Mentor Sans Bold font so that I can just use a | and the diamond pops up without changing fonts

~

EDIT: On second thought, the disparity between the encounter header colors is probably there because I'm pretty sure BlindOgre scanned his PHB to get that Cleric power. The scanning process probably threw off the color just a bit. I was also going to add that it looks like the scanner auto-sharpened the PHB version, which is another giveaway which is his version (because it is straight from his document editor and has no such flaws). It's also worth noting that my sampling of BlindOgre's scan gives me: R 143; G 33; B 46 and a sampling of his version gives me: R 139; G 18; B 49. This give me four different sets of numbers for the encounter power; this has to tell you something . . . although I don't really know what. I guess just pick your favorite

~

My colors came directly from the official PHB PDF, but I forgot to mention that I nudged the colors a tad for the sake of my laser printer. Which brings up another point - matching colors exactly is a pain when it comes to printed results. I have 4 PHBs, an MM and DMG, and the full set of official PDFs. There are slight variances in scanned hue from one to the other, as one will encounter with any printing method. What checks as ok on-screen may look like hell when printed.

 

[Marius Delphus]

And may look great printed on a different printer. And may look weird-but-still-okay on yet a third printer. That's why publishing houses get proof copies from the machine that will actually be used to run final copies at the print house.

I do understand the "dead copy" exercise, so for what it's worth, Blind, the "faux bold" is still quite obvious in your, what is it, a screencap? To me it is, anyway.

You said you were trying to dial in the font sizing and spacing: using my handy-dandy printer's point ruler on my copy of the PHB, I'd say the power listings appear to have text size/leading of 8.75/10 (there's a couple points of padding above and below the italic paragraph). The color bar appears to be 14.5 points thick; the power name looks like 11 point text and the other text there is back to the 8.75 size. The PHB text appears to be tracked just a smidgen looser than yours, as well, but that's harder to nail down looking at a screencap versus printed pages.

Now, I used Warnock and Myriad to substitute for Mentor and Mentor Sans when I did my versions of the MM pages WOTC released. They worked well enough. Not, strictly speaking, a suggestion*; just a point of reference. Also, it wasn't a "dead copy" exercise but an intentional departure just for my own amusement.

* Though personally I find something annoying about Mentor. I think it's that it has too great an x-height to support the chosen leading. I'm not sure though. And in any case, that's entirely a matter of opinion and personal preference and whatnot (I *am* glad it's not Times New Roman or Bodoni, two of my least favorite text fonts), and I probably think too much about these things anyway.

 

[BlindOgre]

And may look great printed on a different printer. And may look weird-but-still-okay on yet a third printer. That's why publishing houses get proof copies from the machine that will actually be used to run final copies at the print house.

I do understand the "dead copy" exercise, so for what it's worth, Blind, the "faux bold" is still quite obvious in your, what is it, a screencap? To me it is, anyway.

You said you were trying to dial in the font sizing and spacing: using my handy-dandy printer's point ruler on my copy of the PHB, I'd say the power listings appear to have text size/leading of 8.75/10 (there's a couple points of padding above and below the italic paragraph). The color bar appears to be 14.5 points thick; the power name looks like 11 point text and the other text there is back to the 8.75 size. The PHB text appears to be tracked just a smidgen looser than yours, as well, but that's harder to nail down looking at a screencap versus printed pages.

Now, I used Warnock and Myriad to substitute for Mentor and Mentor Sans when I did my versions of the MM pages WOTC released. They worked well enough. Not, strictly speaking, a suggestion*; just a point of reference. Also, it wasn't a "dead copy" exercise but an intentional departure just for my own amusement.

* Though personally I find something annoying about Mentor. I think it's that it has too great an x-height to support the chosen leading. I'm not sure though. And in any case, that's entirely a matter of opinion and personal preference and whatnot (I *am* glad it's not Times New Roman or Bodoni, two of my least favorite text fonts), and I probably think too much about these things anyway.

Screen caps, indeed... sqished into jpgs that don't quite render very well.

I obsess on these points as well (no pun intended). I'm not overloading the font controls, just using the base sizes and a little tweaking of line spacing. At this point, I'm confident that given a little more control and a few more rounds of adjustment, I could nail the thing...

So, at this point I will start diverging. Reasons: Mentor bleeds too much when printed with a white font on a dark background. The faded text background renders poorly in jpg and on some printers. The proper Mentor Italic scaled normally is both a bit thin and crowded for these old eyes. While the fonts do well for offset or high-res printing, they don't print as well as others on a laser.

The style in general is almost too clean for a fantasy game. It has a distinctly modular look, but similar blocks tend to blur in one's mind with no iconic image or glyph tags to identify the different power types (as with the attack types for monsters).

Also, someone who is Red-Green color-blind may have a hell of a time telling the power types apart via the color coding.

In the next couple of days, I'll do up my own styling on the blocks and will pass them along for here for feedback.

A truly evil though of mine has been to take the 4e look back to 3.5 OGL material... just to see how it would look

 

[Marius Delphus]

I'm red-green color blind, and I can vouch for having a bit of trouble differentiating the "wine red" and "dark gray" at a glance in my PHB. This is part of the reason I like some of the ideas I've seen in the "power cards" thread: icons in addition to colors make things perfectly clear even to someone that can't see any colors at all. "Rainbow red" would be much easier for me to see.

It's a problem I'll have to decide whether and how to solve when and if the time comes.

Is it *as* evil as trying to re-code 3.5 spells, monster special abilities, and so forth as Int vs. Reflex, and the like?

 

[BlindOgre]

I'm red-green color blind, and I can vouch for having a bit of trouble differentiating the "wine red" and "dark gray" at a glance in my PHB. This is part of the reason I like some of the ideas I've seen in the "power cards" thread: icons in addition to colors make things perfectly clear even to someone that can't see any colors at all. "Rainbow red" would be much easier for me to see.

It's a problem I'll have to decide whether and how to solve when and if the time comes.

Is it *as* evil as trying to re-code 3.5 spells, monster special abilities, and so forth as Int vs. Reflex, and the like?

Re-coding 3.5 stuff into 4e is another topic - and about a dozen times more evil than porting back the stat block layouts

Regarding the colors, I think that nicely done icons and distinctive (but not large) borders with color highlights would be nice... will see what I can come up with.

 

[CinnamonPixie]

I'm red-green color blind, and I can vouch for having a bit of trouble differentiating the "wine red" and "dark gray" at a glance in my PHB.

I have that same problem (same form of color blindness even) when I glance at my books too!

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

Thank you to those of you who gave me the formatting/color info. While I don't think I'm going to get the Mentor fonts, my Toolkit now does fairly accurate power cards, thanks to you guys:

Put in the data and that's what comes out. You can change the colors from the defaults if you want, but otherwise it's entirely automatic.

 

[The Little Raven]

For those interested in the proper color formatting, these values were derived from the official PDFs sold at DriveThruRPG, verified with the colors shown in the SRD.

Power (At-Will)

* RGB: R 0, G 143, B 0
* HSL: H 80, S 240, L 67
* Hex Code: #008f00
* CMYK: C 1.000, M 0.000, Y 1.000, K 0.439

Power (Encounter)

* RGB: R 148, G 19, B 0
* HSL: H 5, S 240, L 70
* Hex Code: #941300
* CMYK: C 0.000, M 0.872, Y 1.000, K 0.420

Power (Daily)

* RGB: R 0, G 0, B 0
* HSL: H 0, S 0, L 0
* Hex Code: #000000
* CMYK: C 0.000, M 0.000, Y 0.000, K 1.000

Magic Item

* RGB: R 255, G 125, B 0
* HSL: H 20, S 240, L 120
* Hex Code: #ff7d00
* CMYK: C 0.000, M 0.510, Y 1.000, K 0.000

DMG Headers (Artifact, Disease, Trap and Hazard, and Poison)

* RGB: R 99, G 53, B 67
* HSL: H 228, S 73, L 72
* Hex Code: #633543
* CMYK: C 0.000, M 0.465, Y 0.323, K 0.612
* Note: The SRD uses the same red as the Power (Encounter) header, while the actual DMG uses maroon.

Monster

* RGB: R 78, G 92, B 46
* HSL: H 52, S 80, L 65
* Hex Code: #4E5C2E
* CMYK: C 0.152, M 0.000, Y 0.500, K 0.639

PHB Table Header

* RGB: R 18, G 50, B 74
* HSL: H 137, S 146, L 43
* Hex Code: #12324a
* CMYK: C 0.757, M 0.324, Y 0.000, K 0.710

Table Entry (Dark)

* RGB: R 206, G 205, B 181
* HSL: H 38, S 49, L 182
* Hex Code: #cecdb5
* CMYK: C 0.000, M 0.005, Y 0.121, K 0.192

Table Entry (Light)

* RGB: R 242, G 242, B 235
* HSL: H 40, S 51, L 224
* Hex Code: #f2f2eb
* CMYK: C 0.000, M 0.000, Y 0.029, K 0.051