Finally got around to building a Macro Photo Studio. Built out of a 16" box, which may be a little small for a full sized game, but should be just right for Cybil's product shots. I've still got shadow and light source brightness issues to work out (cheated using curves in Photoshop, but the green felt pieces in the plastic bag ended up darker than they should be). It'll get better with practice.
Anyway, the purpose of the photo setup was to take a picture of my minor adjustment to the travel vesion of Settlers of Catan. In the travel version the numbers are fixed, which makes the game far less variable. I decided to print out numbers and figure out how to attach them temporarily to the board. I was going to use velcro, but Cybil pointed out the sticky-backed velcro sticks harder to itself than the glue back does to plastic. She suggested sandpaper and felt, but I eventually settled on heavy leather backings that didn't wouldn't blow away as somebody walked by.
For the lettering I chose Adobe Caslon, bold, medium, and normal weights. It has nice energetic varience in the stroke width and reads well at small and large sizes. I made the most common numbers (6. and 8) the largest and heaviest, and the least common (2 and 12) small and light, using both size and weight to exagerate the indication of their probability. The only numbers that required re-working after my initial draft were the sixes and nines. I had originally used periods to indicate which was right-side up, but that was insufficient. The most space efficient solution ended up being to leave the periods on the sixes (6.) and underline the nines (9)
No comments:
Post a Comment