Creating High Quality Cards - Fonts Revisited

[Xorlof]

Back in 2007, @GreyOwl scanned some cards and twiddled with options to try to determine what were the correct font settings for cards. I haven't found any updates around here to those specificatons--perhaps there are, but thought it would be good to do an independent investigation using the higher quality Wave 9 images Hasbro released in 2009, instead of scans. Why? It should result in more accurate results, and using the best specs you can find will result in much better (and more authentic) looking cards. It's kind of a big deal. Really.

Lots of notes are in spoilers because I can't help myself. Feel free to skip any of them. They're mostly unnecessary detail. Follow these specs and your cards will look better than using selecting fonts, weights, and sizes that are just somewhat close (e.g., Arial Narrow and such). Exact placement matters too but I haven't documented that here.

Spoiler Alert!

My specs differ from GreyOwl's findings in many details, probably due to both changes in the card templates that Hasbro used and imprecision inherit in his process. Even though he appears to have been meticulous, he had to use scans of prints that used a halftone offset press technique. That means those scans will have some "sloppiness" in the image and require some judgement calls. (Take a magnifying glass to a Heroscape card to see what I mean).

Unlike the cards GreyOwl examined, I found no evidence of fonts being stretched for W9. Some areas did have the letter spacing expanded or condensed, which some call kerning. In those cases, in the specs below, + means expand and - means contract.

Wave 9 Text Specifications
I think all waves after W9 appear to use these same specs, but haven't examined them in detail. Sizes and spacings accurate to about 1/200th of an inch.

Figure name
Helvetica Neue Heavy Condensed (87). 10.25pt. White (#FFFFFF). All caps. For multi-line names, line spacing is 1.03 (?). One card in W9 had too long of a name (Axegrinders) and the size was dropped to 9.6pt.

Faction/General Name
Helvetica Neue Medium Condensed (67). 7.0pt. #FFFFFF. All caps.

Left Box (Species, Class, Personality, Unique/Common, Hero/Squad)
Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed (77). 7.0pt. #FFFFFF. All caps. Letter spacing is typically natural, but is condensed as needed to fit the text. "COMMON SQUAD" for example, uses about a -0.18pt spacing.

Size and Height
Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed (77). 10.0pt. #FFFFFF. All caps.

Spoiler Alert!

Note that on older cards Size/Height were not white (instead using the same slightly grayish color that the Move/Range/Attack/Defense text uses) but going back to at least SotM, this was switched to pure white to match the rest of the text in this left portion of the card. The 2010 Samuel Brown card is an exception, but I think one can make educated guesses as to why that might be.

Move, Range, Attack, Defense - the labels ( <-- those words )
Helvetica Neue Bold (75). 10.0pt. #D5D8D7. Letter spacing +1.0pt. All caps.

Spoiler Alert!

Older cards used a color value closer to #DCDDDE here and everywhere else I quote a color of #D5D8D7. I'm not sure why there is this variance. Maybe it is a shift due to color space conversions in the various sources I used. It seems to be so small of a change that it would have taken a very detailed designer to want to tweak it by such a small amount. Maybe Hasbro has those, and it is further evidence of the care they take with their products.

Move, Range, Attack, Defense - the values (numbers)
Helvetica Neue Bold (75). 12.0pt. #D5D8D7.

Move, Range, Attack, Defense - labels below the numbers
Helvetica Neue Medium Condensed (67). 6pt. #D5D8D7. Letter spacing +0.1pt. All caps.

Points Value
Helvetica Neue Bold (75). 12.0pt. #FFFFFF, except on Jandar which is #121212.

Spoiler Alert!

It may surprise some to find out that black text on Heroscape cards is not full black (#00000). I know it surprised me. We still use full black in C3V, although maybe that will change with these findings. I think the value for this used to be #231F20, before it was switched to #121212. I've played around with all three of these values and agree that #121212 is the most pleasant looking of the three. If the very dark hit-zone area is modified to be less black, then the older #231F20 is better.)

Points Label (the word "points")
Helvetica Neue Medium Condensed (67). 6.0pt. All caps. #FFFFFF, except on Jandar which is #121212.

Life Value
Helvetica Neue Bold (75). 12.0pt. #FFFFFF

Life Label (the word "life")
Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed (77). 7.0pt. #D5D8D7. All caps. Letter spacing +0.1pt.

Special Ability Name
Helvetica Neue Bold Condensed (77). 8.0pt. #121212. All caps. Letter spacing -0.08pt. line spacing 1.1.

Font size and even line spacing are decreased as needed to make special ability text fit. The smallest in W9 is the repulsors with a size of 6.25pt (and less than 1.05 spacing).

Special Ability Text
Helvetica Neue Condensed (57). Font size is always 0.70pt smaller than the Special Ability Name size used on the card, so 7.3pt down to 5.55pt for Wave 9. #121212. Letter-spacing nominally +0.18pt, but sometimes reduced as low as +0.15pt to fit more text on card. Line spacing is somewhat irregular, between 1.15 and 1.17 (can change from ability-to-ability on the same card), which I think is just an unnoticed error in their templates. Line spacing is also not consistently adjusted correctly when the font size is reduced to fit more text, sometimes leading to large values (e.g., numbers as high 1.4).

Spoiler Alert!

After determining all of the specs above, I remembered there was high quality PDFs for both Skahen and Sam Brown. I wish I remembered that earlier because certain information can be read directly from the PDF and it would have saved me time, but W9 came out after Skahen so there were some minor updates to the templates anyway and it was nice having her card to confirm my calculations where there weren't updates. Sam Brown's PDF is less helpful because it actually used an older template despite coming out later.

I haven't finished with my investigation the Basic side. I've got the fonts, weights, colors, and sizes figured out. I just have to double-check letter-spacing values.