Fall of the Republic: Design Notes - Part 4: Graphic Design
By F. May

Breasts, butts and legs.

Who would you rather be stuck with on a desert island? Leia or Yarna d’al’ Gargan? They’ve both got long hair. They both wear bikinis. What’s the difference? The difference is the look. One is attractive, the other makes you want to hurl. Now I’m not saying that Yarna wouldn’t be found attractive by someone out there (I don’t want to directly impose my views onto anyone, God forbid), but everyone has their own opinion when it comes to what’s pleasing to the eye. So what is pleasing to the eye? A red Ferrari? Maybe. Hot athletic chicks? Possibly, but isn’t this all just a shallow view on everything and what the hell has all this got to do with Graphic Design, the IDC or the TCG for that matter? Well, nothing really, but it raises an interesting point in regards to the look of something. Since I was in charge of Graphic Design, I had to stick to what I found to be attractive. Whether we like it or not, everything in life is based on image. From the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the cars we drive. If we all listened to all the people who say “it’s what’s on the inside that counts”, the planet would no doubt be a better place. But when it comes to the TCG, image is everything.

Since this was the inaugural IDC set, a statement had to be made to the Star Wars TCG community. The set had to have certain units, great text, and at my end, I felt that the set had to look great. Or at least as great as I could get it. If the final card images didn’t look very good, were too slapdash or didn’t come close at all in looking like the Wizard’s sets, it would be very hard to get the TCG community to accept this or any future IDC set. It wouldn’t matter if cool new units like Grievous or the inclusion of a cool new ability like Parry were in the set if the final images looked like garbage. This was it. The moment of truth. This set’s total image had to be attractive. It had to be great.

The first step was to create some templates and find out what the real fonts were. There are other templates around, but truth be told, they were very small, I found the print quality of them fairly poor and other things like the colouring not being quite right were issues I had with them. They’re great for posting, but not so great for printing and being able to print good quality cards was what a big part of this project was, so in the end, I made new one’s. This also removed any possible future drama in case anyone complained about their templates being used. I tested the new templates with a couple of dream cards and a run of You Make The Card. Interestingly enough, this was just for a bit of fun and was never connected with the IDC, but the IDC version of the Invisible Hand (A) has the exact same text, (this is complete coincidence so I’m told) so I thought we’d end that run of YMTC with the release of FOTR. There will be an official YMTC in a future set among other games developed by Graphic Design. So stay tuned.

With templates and fonts organized, I waited for the Master List from Card Development to arrive. This time allowed me to concentrate on another area dedicated to Graphic Design. The set expansion symbol. Once the name of the set is decided by Card Development, it is announced to all the subcommittees. Although I didn’t have much info available due to the non-disclosure rule set by the IDC Charter, I still had enough info to make a design call on the symbol’s look and direction. It was a set based on Revenge Of The Sith and Grievous was a much anticipated card. So it seemed obvious to me that Grievous would become the symbol. This was drawn in vector graphics. I made a few others just so there was some choice, (Commander Bly and Darth Sidious) but of course Grievous was the ‘image to be’.
By this stage I was thinking about the packet images and what they’d look like. Again, I went back to the look and feel of Revenge Of The Sith and settled on a red and yellow colour scheme for them. Red and yellow was also used for Wizards ROTS set, but I differentiated the IDC packs from that set by using silver ends on the packets instead of black and going back to placing film images in the backgrounds as Wizards did on earlier packs.

I don’t want this article turning into a Photoshop tutorial, but I will briefly explain how I went about making images for certain cards after I received the Master List for those that are interested. The majority of the images were taken from DVD. These had some adjustments to colour, contrast and brightness. Nothing major. The images basically just needed to be centered appropriately on the template so the main focus was on the subject of the card. In some instances, some radical editing was needed to bring the main focus of the card forward and so make it clearly visible. One card that had this work was Crab Droid. The Crab Droid image was good, but it had other objects in the frame that distracted the eye from the subject. The main technique I used was to first duplicate the image, then cut the background out of the duplicated image leaving only the subject. In this case the subject was the Crab Droid. I now had two layers. One of the original image and the second layer being the cut out Crab Droid. I adjusted the colour, contrast and brightness to both layers as usual and then blurred the first layer until I was satisfied with the result leaving the top layer (the cut out Crab Droid) in focus. This simple technique helped to separate the subject from the background.

There were suggestions from Card Development that accompanied the Master List with a recommendation on what type of image or movie scene could be used. This was usually followed, although there were a couple of cards in which I felt a different image could be used for greater impact. One of those cards was Growing Power. Originally, the suggested pic was from the scene where Vader is talking to Sidious via holoprojector, but I felt the scene I chose did in fact give a greater impact and fitted the cards ability perfectly.

I won’t bore you with the details of the final stages of GD’s responsibilities like making the Lackey plugin images, sorting the images for hosting online and making the final pdf’s other than this is the most time consuming part of GD and of course it’s the least fun. This stage reinforced the fact that this is ‘work’ and GD is involved in a lot more than just mere “data entry”. There was a lot of work involved in making this set a reality but work we were more than happy to do. I’d like to thank IVIace Windu and nextlevel88 for their time and effort in the Graphic Design committee. I would also like to thank Skywlkr for helping out with the promotional posters when GD didn't have time to create them and there was no Public Affairs chair to do the work. All in all, I was very happy with the final set and was extremely chuffed that so many people expressed their positive comments about the images and have accepted the IDC as a positive and contributing factor to the survival of the Star Wars TCG.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ve got to go into town and mix another band at a nightclub. No doubt they’ll be sporting the latest haircuts and dressing to fit into the latest fashion trend. Usually these young bands can’t manage to string two chords together or sing to save themselves, but at least these people get their look right. Musical talent or skill takes a backseat, because as you and I know, image is everything.

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About the Author
F.May has been a player since it hit the shores of Australia in mid 2002 and was the Graphic Design Chairperson for FOTR. He is married with four children and works as a music teacher and freelance audio engineer working part time for concert production companies and studio work. He has been a member of Rebelbasers since May of 2003 and is currently at 10% warn level. He posts under the name Mixmaster.