Today I Learned: July 10, 2019
Sympy. Card templates. Farmer subsidies.
1) Sympy
I learned a bit about Sympy today. Sympy is a Python package for symbolic mathematics. It lets you do things like write and solve algebraic equations or take derivatives and integrals of a function (analytically, not numerically!). Basically, it lets Python act less like C and more like WolframAlpha or Mathematica.
Sympy is… well, I’m sure it’s great, but it’s not nearly as, uh, nice as I hoped. It doesn’t actually add anything to the Python language, so all of the equations you write down have to be declared in function calls. It’s functional, but ugly.
2) How to make a card template look good
I spent some time looking at science-fiction-themed trading card games today. Specifically, I want to know how to make a trading card look good.
Exhibit A:
These look pretty nice. How?
One thing that stands out to me is the lining on the edges of boxes. Every box has a little bevel that makes it look like the text and pictures are inset into (or out of) some sort of metal frame. Another thing — aside from text boxes, nothing has a solid-color background. The rebel card has a lot of camo-like texture in the card background, while the imperial card frame has some subtle color gradients to give it a metallic look. Finally, notice the notching on the upper corners of the flavor text boxes. The notches are nice because they let the faction symbols (top-left) and “destiny values” (top-right) be a little bigger without cutting much into the flavor text box. I’d also never noticed before that imperial and rebel cards have different notches — the imperial card frame notches are straight and angular, while the rebel frame notches are round and smooth.
Here’s the card template from a different Star Wars card game (there have been a lot):
Quite a different style. Firstly, these cards are dark. It occurs to me that almost every one I’ve seen uses art with a pretty dark color palette, but even a bright picture wouldn’t do that much to lighten the overall card look. WotC’s card template uses plainer backgrounds than Decipher’s, probably because they’ve gotten rid of almost everything that isn’t a text box or art. They still use gradients, I would guess to give the whole card a bit of a curved-back, 3D look. This template heavily leans on a particular box shape — flat tops and bottoms, convex left and right sides — to give it a bit of a Star Wars feel, and it uses a couple of fonts with a squared-off, techy look to emphasize its sci-fi-ness.
Here’s a template from a totally different game:
I would argue that these don’t look as nice as the previous examples, but they’re nice enough. These cards use very simple elements. Every box is either a square or a trapezoid. Most of the backgrounds are solid black, although there is some light texturing in the banners at the top. The symbols all use color gradients to give them a metallic look, and several of them use subtle one-sided beveling to add a little shadow effect. Somehow the symbols and numbers look cheap to me, though, perhaps because they’re really big. Overall, though, these designs are pretty simple, but still look pretty good.
Here’s something on the opposite end of the complexity spectrum, visual design-wise.
Wow, there’s a lot going on here. Firstly, netrunner has a lot of different card templates — this isn’t even all of them — and they all have unique graphic design elements. There’s a ton of detail all over the place — every inch of every card is either art, text, or covered in greebles, and even the main boxes have color gradients, unusual shapes, faction watermarks, subtle and unique text dividing lines, and overlaid elements like the little trashcan. The basic cost and use symbols are fairly large, but also complex — look closely at the credit symbols in the upper-left corner of (most of) these cards! It’s clear to me that a ton of work went into making these things look good.
Okay, one more, though this isn’t from a sci-fi game:
There are a bunch of details here I hadn’t really appreciated before. Firstly, notice how virtually everything emphasizes the color of the card, down to the color of the lining of every text or art box (although there’s a very thin black border separating the art from its frame). These cards also use a distinct lack of gradients, with the exceptions of the set symbols (that “M15” thing in the middle-right) and the color gradient in the text box of Yavimaya Coast. Instead, MtG uses subtle, subtle texturing — look closely at each of the three cards’ text boxes, and you’ll see high-frequency, low-contrast texturing to make it look a little more interesting. Same for the name and type bars at the top and middle of the card, not to mention the card background. The card title font is a proprietary font made specifically for MtG, which I’d say is probably the best-fit font of any we’ve seen so far. The color symbols are beautiful examples of simple, two-color (no-gradient!) symbols that are legible even when very small.
One final thing I’ve never appreciated about the MtG card frame is the subtle use of shadowing. Check out the bevels on the top and bottom of the title box. There’s a shadow on the bottom, but not the top. That’s a nice way of subtly reinforcing a tiny bit of three-dimensionality in a consistent way. Also, beautifully, all of the mana symbols use the same shadowing!
3) Farmer subsidies in Northeast Asia
Today I learned that agriculture is heavily subsidized in northeast Asia. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all buy produce from their farmers at above-market rates, and then sell to consumers (sometimes at below-market rates, sometimes not). It’s all really a wealth transfer from taxpayers to farmers, but it’s done in a way that still rewards agricultural production.