Graphic Design
Gaming is an experience, and players/publishers can't experience it properly if it looks terrible.
If you're experienced with graphic design, you can ignore this article.
The game should be neat. This means it's simple, clear, and not ugly.
The best design is design done by a professional. The second-best design is no design at all, which is what you should do.
A neat game appears like a blank canvas to a publisher. It's not amateurish and off-putting. Nor is it so professional that the publisher assumes you want to keep it, and that it can't be changed.
Remember that you're designing for a publisher, not the final players. Even if you are designing directly for the players, most of this still holds true.
Layout
Your design should only be composed of art and blocks of flat colour. Choose your fonts carefully, and make nice icons. That's usually not wasted time.
For cards, the easiest design is that the top two thirds of the card is a square piece of art, and the bottom third is the title, text, and stats. You can put a cost icon in the top corner (on top of the art) if you need to. Just use this design. If you're thinking that's not enough space for your text, then your game has too much text. Reduce it, or design something else.
Avoid boxes on cards. Just go right to the edge.
If you're designing a board, make everything the same size. Organise everything in the simplest fashion possible. Put things into nice lines and grids, all with the same layout. Only the information should vary.
Embellishments
Your layout (of cards and other objects) should just be flat areas of muted colour, with text on them, and the card art. (Text should not go on top of art.)
The more work you do, the worse your design is.
Do not use:
- Bevels
- Gradients
- Shadows
- Textures
- Backgrounds
- Semi-transparent panels
- Semi-transparent anything at all
- Text colours other than black or white
- Outlines on text
- Any other kind of "design"
In my farm game, the board is just solid dark grey, with a grid of rectangles in it, of various pastel colours. I'm very fancy though, so I've given these rectangles slightly rounded corners. Each rectangle has a title, an icon or two, and maybe some plain text. That's not a first prototype. That's after 178 revisions.
Text
Spend some time trying out a few different fonts. Thoughtful font selection is a very easy way to make your game look good. Do not use standard body fonts like Arial, or their modern equivalents.
Also, your text size is too small. Yes, you. Almost all prototypes have text that's too small.
Radlands has about 40 characters per line, including spaces, which is about nine words.
I generally design with 20-30 characters per line.
Artwork
Absolutely do not commission or compose artwork. This is unusual for a prototype. A publisher will want to throw it all away, and assume that you might not agree to that. A design that looks too complete can easily be a negative. This is an extremely common beginner mistake.
Use art from DeviantArt or Google Images. If you're just playtesting, no one will ever know or care that you've used their art as a temporary placeholder. Freepik is great, as are A.I. image generators. Dall-E is the easiest to use, in my experience.
Do not present people with text-only game components. They want to know which card the dragon is, without having to read each card.
For fantasy or sci-fi, there's enough art available, but for almost anything real-world, I like to use vectors. These are simple, flat-colour illustrations. They give a consistent feel, they're easily editable, and they can be scaled infinitely.