Oh, good, a chance to vent and rant!
Good riddance to "pretty pages"!!! (As far as they've actually gotten rid of them, anyway!)
I'm probably in a very small small minority, but I positively
hate and
despise pretty for pretty's sake, art for art's sake, cuteness for cuteness' sake, fanciness for fanciness' sake, style for style's sake. To me, any publication should be all about
informational content: all content, all the time, and nothing detracting or distracting from it. Any graphic art or design should be all about -- and
only about -- the enhancement of the delivery of content. Pictures are great, so long as they truly are "worth a thousand words" as the old saying goes and the presence of the picture does not interfere with the delivery of the textual information.
J_D's Guide to Bad and Good Graphic Design:
I
hate watermarks! All text should be black on white, or at most one single TextColor on one single PageColor where TextColor is dark and PageColor is light and there is sufficient contrast to be easily readable. Light text on a black page is OK for a computer screen, but... um... (revising wording)... is
really bad on paper. But it should be a single plain color underneath the text, with no design or art at all directly underneath the text!
Pictures are great, if (a) they serve an informative purpose (e.g. replace a paragraph or more of description, or are charts or diagrams to visualize what the text is talking about), and (b) are rectangular in format so they do not interfere with the regular column format of the text. I
hate jagged, non-bordered pictures that flow into text or force the column borders to be irregular and jagged. If a column edge won't line up on a straightedge, it's bad! Ideally, pictures should fit within a whole number of column widths (i.e. take up one whole column or two whole columns, etc, but never half a column) and should always be strictly rectangular. If a picture is a
portrait of some person or object, the rectangle should be filled in with a decent background and it should
not be just the item itself with no background. If it's just a line-drawing or schematic (e.g. top-view, side-view), then no background is needed but it should still not disrupt column boundaries.
I like the text to be all one font. Titles and section headers can be made larger point-size, boldened or italicized, but I
hate using different font faces for headers!
Also, I
hate the splatters in the middle of the page of a text-bite or quoted phrase that is an exact duplicate of text in the columns but at twice the font size. That is absolutely pointless! It does not contribute at all to the information presented (being a mere copy) and also interferes with the straightedge columns!
I
hate the fancy artistic borders around the tops, sides and bottoms of pages! They do not convey any information at all! if white is good for the page containing the text, then white is good all the way to the edge of the paper!
The new Dragon format initiated in #323 is, in my opinion, an improvement but it does not go far enough. It uses those mid-page double-size text-bites all over the place, and it still does use the watermarks or mid-page designs. Take a look at pages 54-59 and 63-66; these pages are bold examples of what
not to do in terms of graphic design! Oh, and look at the Class Acts article on pp.96-106 Two colums of text is okay, but look at the watermarked sideways classnames and the iconic character picuters! They waste an entire inch and a quarter of each page, top to bottom, and convey no additioal information at all! Bah!
Simple and clean design is good; as the saying goes "elegant in its simplicity". Artsy-fartsy stuff for no other sake or purpose than art is bad in a magazine (unless it's specifically an art magazine, of course). This is a magazine to convey information, not a museum!
Ideally, I'd like Dragon Magazine to be 100% gaming content (other than the ads that help pay for it, of course) -- all gaming info, all the time! Besides the art advice above, Drop the comics -- it isn't supposed to be a comic book! Drop the fiction -- there's plenty of other magazines for fantasy fiction short stories -- unless the purpose of the fiction is the delivery of fluff about a specific game setting and there is a
large amount of setting info in the fiction! Gaming info, all gaming info, nothing but gaming info -- all the time!
[And yes, I think the graphic design in much of the hardcover books is really bad too, and much of the art is pretty awful. When I buy a gaming book, I buy it for the info, not for the art! At the very least, bring back Elmore and Caldwell and Easley, and dump most of the 3rd Ed. 'artists'!]
Well, that's my rant! It's been building up for years! I just had to get that off my chest, and I know most people will disagree and think I have no taste! Flame away, if you like!
(P.S. I like beige box computers, too, and hate the artsy design that Apple and some case-makers are foisting off on us! Beige boxes are more professional looking.)
