Perhaps this is more of a GQ question, but here goes:
I’m designing custom cards for a game I’m developing. I will basically need to lay out some graphics and text and then import the result into an Avery template in Word.
My question is, what is the best product to do this with. I’ve found using Word’s graphic capabilities to be very frustrating. Should I be using something like Pagemaker (which I have access to) or would a program such as Photoshop Elements do the trick?
Well, Photoshop is great if you have the skill to ‘paint’ the cards from scratch, but I think a vector-based package like Adobe Illustrator or Corel DRAW! would be much easier to work with for something like a playing card.
But I imagine it all comes down to individual skill levels and preferences. Me, I don’t have the hand-eye coordination to free draw complex shapes, so Bezier curves make my day.
I’m no artist and won’t be drawing anything. For prototypes I’ll be hijacking graphics off the web. When (if) I ever actually produce it, I’ll get someone to actually draw pictures for me and scan them in. I just need to place them on the page, get the words to sometimes overlap the graphics and generally look nice.
Oh, you want a page layout package. Pagemaker is certainly one of the best for that.
But you know you can do fairly sophisticated layout in Word if you eventually have to get it into Word in the first place. Look into using Frames. Embed your pictures into frames, and then you can move them around wherever you want.
I agree that Word is a pain for page layout, and I wouldn’t use it if I were designing a graphical book. But for a regular book with illustrations, it’s fine. I’ve designed 200 page books in word, but for books with lots and lots of pictures, I’d go to something like Pagemaker.
Why do you have to import it back into word? I think you might find that the importing feature doesn’t work all that well with complex pages. If you just need avery templates, they should be available with Pagemaker as well. The package I’ve used in the past was Ventura Publisher, which is now owned by Corel.
I recently made a board game with cards, and I used Visio. I almost used Quark XPress, but I liked Visio better.
An issue I ran into: I printed the cards on double-sided matte paper, that was intended for photographs. The quality of the printing was really super, but the cards stuck to each other. Not as in wet-ink-stuck, but as in they didn’t slide very well. In fact very poorly. If you come up with a good solution, I’d love to know about it.
I recently made a board game with cards, and I used Visio. I almost used Quark XPress, but I liked Visio better.
An issue I ran into: I printed the cards on double-sided matte paper, that was intended for photographs. The quality of the printing was really super, but the cards stuck to each other. Not as in wet-ink-stuck, but as in they didn’t slide very well. In fact very poorly. If you come up with a good solution, I’d love to know about it.