I always enjoyed a certain type of OSR book - a bit nostalgic, B&W old school illustrations.

For my 5e games, I expected some color and color art.

I noticed most OSR products, including the hugely successful DCC, LOTFP and OSE, use few colors and prefer this sort of simpler/funny/naïf art - despite some amazing covers and a few awesome color inserts. Knave and Maze rats are pure text with clever layout.

LFG might be an exception with LFG deluxe (also Mork Borg with big letter, many colors and a list of 12 weapons occupying one or two entire pages).

My own OSR products follow the same pattern, more or less (I used color in my 5e products, however, because I thought this would fit the system better), although I include no art for shorter books of random tables, etc., as I don't think it adds much in these cases.

Here are some examples of my books (just released a new one!).

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/12430/Chaos-Factory-Books

OTOH I always liked colorful monster manuals (since the 2e MM) and setting books. I'm not a fan of 3e and 4e looks but I think some 5e books look amazing.

I addition, a decent index with links is important to me.

How important are production values to you? Art? Index? Page decoration? Organization?

Or do you ALWAYS value content over looks?

Also, if you don't have professional art, you'd rather have stock art, AI art, PD art, or something else?

While I haven't publicly published a book yet, layout is important to me - not for aesthetic value, necessarily, but for readability, usability in PDF and book form, and the like. Aesthetics is a nice bonus. I want books that are easy to read. I'm the one using them all, after all, and if I publish them it'll have the hard work done already. Here's some samples of what I'm talking about.



The rightmost was my old book design for Taiao, my primary system. The second-to-rightmost fancy gold design and the leftmost one with an inked illustration are, respectively, a design style I tried and rejected and the design style I'm currently running with. The second-to-leftmost two pages are from Magical Angry, a system I'm tinkering with about dark magical girls.

Organization, organization, organization. I like highlighting important terms in text. In Taiao, I put character ability scores in a bolded red, and combat attributes in blue. It draws attention fast to mechanical parts of the text. Magical Angry isn't mechanically complicated enough to do that to. I tried it in the first couple of iterations, but I stripped it out eventually.

I also dislike headings that break across multiple pages. If I can help it, every single text block under a heading can be fitted under the same page it's on. Reading through multiple pages on a PDF viewer is a bitch, doesn't matter if the PDF is landscape or portrait-oriented. If a heading is too long to fit onto a single page, add subheadings and split it up because it's gotten too long, or trim it down because it might have gotten too wordy. Shorten everything to the briefest text possible while maintaining the intent and keeping it understandable - that's good editing in my eyes.

On that note, I used to like landscape, but I swapped to portrait eventually. Magical Angry used to be on 8.5x11 paper too, but I swapped it to a 6x9 booklet format for its latest iteration and it's looking a lot cleaner, and I can fit two full left/right pages onto my PDF viewer at once. Isn't that nice?

Black & white irks me, but it's sometimes necessary for print. I normally design in color since I'm writing for PDFs, but I do check to make sure it's legible in B&W too. I ended up swapping to that first design in my image specifically because it could easily support nice-looking black and white inked sketches, which I can do in a hurry or commission for cheap from other artists I know. But I could fit a colored & inked piece in just as easily if I wanted to; it's flexible like that.

I like good art in a book. I imagine everyone does. I might be one of the few artists who expresses a genuine interest in the use of AI art, though. I just don't have an issue with people using it and think the uproar over it is rather amusing, especially from fellow artists.

Ultimately, content and intelligent - not beautiful, but functional and intelligent - layout is more important to me than art. I could have the world's most beautiful book composed entirely of elegant and functional typography without a single picture in it, so long as it was clean to read and had good concepts in the text. But art does sell, so.

The worst sin you can ever commit is publishing a PDF without bookmark data. The second worst is publishing a PDF without bookmark data whose page numbers do not match the PDF viewer's page count. It's usually only old scanned books from the pre-digital era that hit the latter two points, but I've seen some weird cases.

I'm a grognard. I'm also an artist. For me, content is king when it comes to game materials.

I'm not thrilled with PDFs except to easily print things out for use elsewhere. I use hardcover books to read, for prep, and at the table. I don't care how many hot links you put in your PDF, I find them near impossible to read.

I still have my 1e AD&D three books. They remain in great shape, the layout and art is just fine for me. Ditto my 2e Runequest book. Damn, that thing is sturdy. And The Traveller Book from 1982.

You can have no art, you can have clip art, you can have line art drawn with heart. You can have a color cover if it doesn't add appreciably to my cost, otherwise skip it. If you use AI art I will never buy your book. (I'm an artist, remember.) I hate the type of art you see in 5e D&D and similar books. I don't want to be those people in those settings.

As to organization? I think the 1e Players Handbook is well-designed. I grant you the 1e DMG can be hard to digest, because it's written more like a collected series of articles. But it's worked out just fine for me, so I don't see why something similar wouldn't be acceptable.

So those are my opinions. Since you asked, I'm glad to share.

Quote from: saki on April 21, 2023, 10:36:57 PM
While I haven't publicly published a book yet, layout is important to me - not for aesthetic value, necessarily, but for readability, usability in PDF and book form, and the like. Aesthetics is a nice bonus. I want books that are easy to read. I'm the one using them all, after all, and if I publish them it'll have the hard work done already. Here's some samples of what I'm talking about.

The worst sin you can ever commit is publishing a PDF without bookmark data. The second worst is publishing a PDF without bookmark data whose page numbers do not match the PDF viewer's page count. It's usually only old scanned books from the pre-digital era that hit the latter two points, but I've seen some weird cases.

Here's the thing, to match the readers numbers with the index you have to include the cover, etc into the page count, which means your content doesn't start in page 1, because 1 is the cover, it's not page 2 because that's the next to the cover, it's not page 3 because that's other things (like credits and stuff) so your content starts at best at page 5 (assuming your index is only one page and is page 4.

But in printed books this isn't the way to do it, the index and everything before it don't count as pages for the index number. So you either have to make two different PDFs or have the printed one wrong.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 22, 2023, 12:13:37 AM
Here's the thing, to match the readers numbers with the index you have to include the cover, etc into the page count, which means your content doesn't start in page 1, because 1 is the cover, it's not page 2 because that's the next to the cover, it's not page 3 because that's other things (like credits and stuff) so your content starts at best at page 5 (assuming your index is only one page and is page 4.

But in printed books this isn't the way to do it, the index and everything before it don't count as pages for the index number. So you either have to make two different PDFs or have the printed one wrong.

This is true. I don't really care about the PDF page numbers lining up with the digital data page numbers so long as the bookmarks are in place, though, and the PDF format does have support for preliminaries numbered in roman numerals in either case. It's much more convenient digitally to have bookmarks than it is to have numbers that match for a usable TOC page.

Quote from: saki on April 22, 2023, 01:11:27 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 22, 2023, 12:13:37 AM
Here's the thing, to match the readers numbers with the index you have to include the cover, etc into the page count, which means your content doesn't start in page 1, because 1 is the cover, it's not page 2 because that's the next to the cover, it's not page 3 because that's other things (like credits and stuff) so your content starts at best at page 5 (assuming your index is only one page and is page 4.

But in printed books this isn't the way to do it, the index and everything before it don't count as pages for the index number. So you either have to make two different PDFs or have the printed one wrong.

This is true. I don't really care about the PDF page numbers lining up with the digital data page numbers so long as the bookmarks are in place, though, and the PDF format does have support for preliminaries numbered in roman numerals in either case. It's much more convenient digitally to have bookmarks than it is to have numbers that match for a usable TOC page.

I still haven't found how to do this on libreoffice.

Eric,

Which 5E books do you think look amazing? I wasn't impressed with the art in the PhB (the Halfling in pain!) But the maps in the 5E adventure books are amazing.

To answer your questions:

Good content + average art > Poor content + great art. BUT, Good content + awful art = No.

Production values - well I much prefer something like White Box: FMAG https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190631/White-Box--Fantastic-Medieval-Adventure-Game? that buys very decent licenced B&W clip art off drivethru for a few $, as opposed to no-art, free but terrible art, terrible CGI, or incompetent scribblings (including 'artsy' incompetent scribblings). You can make a good looking product without spending a lot of money!



You're spending hundreds of $ to get your OSR product out. Why not send William McAusland a few $ and get some decent licenced art?
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/55149/Dungeon-Portals-set-1
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/181871/Fantasy-Clip-Inks-Spot-Art-Set-7?manufacturers_id=762

If the product is free, I don't mind poor quality art (as much). What grinds my gears is when they deliberately go for that crappy style that a decent chunk of grogs are nostalgic for. I also prefer if the art is consistent. Peter Bradley's work in Castles & Crusades is about the minimum of what I like. The art in Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Rules & Magic is also very good.

2nd edition AD&D art is a feast for the eyes, and incredibly evocative. I consider it the highwater mark for game fantasy art, and if I had any originals I'd happily hang them on my wall. Good luck affording that level of art in the modern gaming economy though.

Quote from: saki on April 21, 2023, 10:36:57 PM
While I haven't publicly published a book yet, layout is important to me - not for aesthetic value, necessarily, but for readability, usability in PDF and book form, and the like. Aesthetics is a nice bonus. I want books that are easy to read. I'm the one using them all, after all, and if I publish them it'll have the hard work done already. Here's some samples of what I'm talking about.



The rightmost was my old book design for Taiao, my primary system. The second-to-rightmost fancy gold design and the leftmost one with an inked illustration are, respectively, a design style I tried and rejected and the design style I'm currently running with. The second-to-leftmost two pages are from Magical Angry, a system I'm tinkering with about dark magical girls.

Organization, organization, organization. I like highlighting important terms in text. In Taiao, I put character ability scores in a bolded red, and combat attributes in blue. It draws attention fast to mechanical parts of the text. Magical Angry isn't mechanically complicated enough to do that to. I tried it in the first couple of iterations, but I stripped it out eventually.

I also dislike headings that break across multiple pages. If I can help it, every single text block under a heading can be fitted under the same page it's on. Reading through multiple pages on a PDF viewer is a bitch, doesn't matter if the PDF is landscape or portrait-oriented. If a heading is too long to fit onto a single page, add subheadings and split it up because it's gotten too long, or trim it down because it might have gotten too wordy. Shorten everything to the briefest text possible while maintaining the intent and keeping it understandable - that's good editing in my eyes.

On that note, I used to like landscape, but I swapped to portrait eventually. Magical Angry used to be on 8.5x11 paper too, but I swapped it to a 6x9 booklet format for its latest iteration and it's looking a lot cleaner, and I can fit two full left/right pages onto my PDF viewer at once. Isn't that nice?

Black & white irks me, but it's sometimes necessary for print. I normally design in color since I'm writing for PDFs, but I do check to make sure it's legible in B&W too. I ended up swapping to that first design in my image specifically because it could easily support nice-looking black and white inked sketches, which I can do in a hurry or commission for cheap from other artists I know. But I could fit a colored & inked piece in just as easily if I wanted to; it's flexible like that.

I like good art in a book. I imagine everyone does. I might be one of the few artists who expresses a genuine interest in the use of AI art, though. I just don't have an issue with people using it and think the uproar over it is rather amusing, especially from fellow artists.

Ultimately, content and intelligent - not beautiful, but functional and intelligent - layout is more important to me than art. I could have the world's most beautiful book composed entirely of elegant and functional typography without a single picture in it, so long as it was clean to read and had good concepts in the text. But art does sell, so.

The worst sin you can ever commit is publishing a PDF without bookmark data. The second worst is publishing a PDF without bookmark data whose page numbers do not match the PDF viewer's page count. It's usually only old scanned books from the pre-digital era that hit the latter two points, but I've seen some weird cases.

Great stuff, you make some good points. I write mostly for PDFs, so always bookmarked and matching pages.

I'm not 100% opposed to AI art, but I won't use it for the time being - I prefer actual artists. OTOH, I have a sense that the coming of AI is inevitable and one day I might have no option.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 22, 2023, 12:13:37 AM

Quote from: saki on April 21, 2023, 10:36:57 PM
While I haven't publicly published a book yet, layout is important to me - not for aesthetic value, necessarily, but for readability, usability in PDF and book form, and the like. Aesthetics is a nice bonus. I want books that are easy to read. I'm the one using them all, after all, and if I publish them it'll have the hard work done already. Here's some samples of what I'm talking about.

The worst sin you can ever commit is publishing a PDF without bookmark data. The second worst is publishing a PDF without bookmark data whose page numbers do not match the PDF viewer's page count. It's usually only old scanned books from the pre-digital era that hit the latter two points, but I've seen some weird cases.

Here's the thing, to match the readers numbers with the index you have to include the cover, etc into the page count, which means your content doesn't start in page 1, because 1 is the cover, it's not page 2 because that's the next to the cover, it's not page 3 because that's other things (like credits and stuff) so your content starts at best at page 5 (assuming your index is only one page and is page 4.

But in printed books this isn't the way to do it, the index and everything before it don't count as pages for the index number. So you either have to make two different PDFs or have the printed one wrong.

I haven't thought about that TBH. As said above, I write mostly for PDFs, so always bookmarked and matching pages. My only print book start on page 1 (index would be page 3 or so). I have a few print books here that work like that (old books, PDFs of it don't exist). I think no one would complain about that in a POD book.

Quote from: Baron on April 21, 2023, 11:56:19 PM
I'm a grognard. I'm also an artist. For me, content is king when it comes to game materials.

I'm not thrilled with PDFs except to easily print things out for use elsewhere. I use hardcover books to read, for prep, and at the table. I don't care how many hot links you put in your PDF, I find them near impossible to read.

I still have my 1e AD&D three books. They remain in great shape, the layout and art is just fine for me. Ditto my 2e Runequest book. Damn, that thing is sturdy. And The Traveller Book from 1982.

You can have no art, you can have clip art, you can have line art drawn with heart. You can have a color cover if it doesn't add appreciably to my cost, otherwise skip it. If you use AI art I will never buy your book. (I'm an artist, remember.) I hate the type of art you see in 5e D&D and similar books. I don't want to be those people in those settings.

As to organization? I think the 1e Players Handbook is well-designed. I grant you the 1e DMG can be hard to digest, because it's written more like a collected series of articles. But it's worked out just fine for me, so I don't see why something similar wouldn't be acceptable.

So those are my opinions. Since you asked, I'm glad to share.

Thanks for sharing! Yeah, it see there are a few people who only use print copies. From my experience, it is simply hard to make print copies work for small games - lots of work, not many additional sales. Might be me - I buy lots of PDFs.

About AD&D 1e... well, I'm a fan of the DMG's content, but I don't find that a hard bar to match in terms of art or organization, with all the tools at our disposal nowadays.

Quote from: Aglondir on April 22, 2023, 01:56:35 AM
Eric,

Which 5E books do you think look amazing? I wasn't impressed with the art in the PhB (the Halfling in pain!) But the maps in the 5E adventure books are amazing.

To answer your questions:

Good content + average art > Poor content + great art. BUT, Good content + awful art = No.

Avernus has some good art, but it is more about the margins of the images, the decoration of the pages, etc. I think 5e excels at that.

Their organization is terrible, however, and I'm no longer buying their stuff anyways, got tired of 5e for various reasons.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on April 21, 2023, 10:08:24 PM
Also, if you don't have professional art, you'd rather have stock art, AI art, PD art, or something else?

There's always AI art. There's actually several Stable Diffusion Checkpoints and LORAs specifically dedicated to cranking out the kind of janky black and white stylized art you see in 1980s and 1990s rulebooks.

Quote from: S'mon on April 22, 2023, 03:05:25 AM
Production values - well I much prefer something like White Box: FMAG https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190631/White-Box--Fantastic-Medieval-Adventure-Game? that buys very decent licenced B&W clip art off drivethru for a few $, as opposed to no-art, free but terrible art, terrible CGI, or incompetent scribblings (including 'artsy' incompetent scribblings). You can make a good looking product without spending a lot of money!



You're spending hundreds of $ to get your OSR product out. Why not send William McAusland a few $ and get some decent licenced art?
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/55149/Dungeon-Portals-set-1
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/181871/Fantasy-Clip-Inks-Spot-Art-Set-7?manufacturers_id=762

Agreed! This is the way I'm doing most of my books (except Teratogenicon, which has professional art).

FH&W might be a great example.

Quote from: migo on April 22, 2023, 08:51:28 AM
If the product is free, I don't mind poor quality art (as much). What grinds my gears is when they deliberately go for that crappy style that a decent chunk of grogs are nostalgic for. I also prefer if the art is consistent. Peter Bradley's work in Castles & Crusades is about the minimum of what I like. The art in Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Rules & Magic is also very good.

Peter Bradley does look amazing, looking by a google search. I do liek some old school art - say, Russ Nicholson - and some OSR B&W art - Richie Longmore (Carcosa).

About lotfp, do you like the interior art too or just the amazing covers/inserts?

Quote from: Grognard GM on April 22, 2023, 11:02:15 AM
2nd edition AD&D art is a feast for the eyes, and incredibly evocative. I consider it the highwater mark for game fantasy art, and if I had any originals I'd happily hang them on my wall. Good luck affording that level of art in the modern gaming economy though.

Man, I'm pretty sure you are NOT talking about the revised PHB. 

Although I do agree about most 2e art (Dark sun, the MM, the covers, etc.)