Designing an RPG book? You need STYLE

When choosing a typeface, make sure it actually comes in italics!! 😉 You did such a great job on the book! I got the revision done quickly with another layout artist because of how well organized the files were too!

Long time lurker here... As a designer/D&D fanatic, this video combines two of my passions and has had me enthralled throughout. I just needed to comment to show my support and to thank you for teaching so passionately. This may even be the inspiration I needed to try the DM's Guild myself!

I've been a designer for 15 years. This video about RPG book design is better than any video on You Tube about page layout. I wish I saw this years ago.

The algorithm blesses me once again. I'm building a mecha RPG and my current project when I find this is to redesign the PDF's aesthetics to match that vibe a bit more. I was looking through some RPG books and realized I could do so much better than my initial bare bones layout. This is such a wonderful wealth of knowledge.

This has legit helped me with book design, I was changing font sizes manually for each line before you mentioned the headers at 19:30 thanks Matthew!

Glad you made this as we are in the middle of figuring this stuff out and this is a nice layout for helping think it through

Absolutely fantastic video, thanks so much for this. I self published an RPG solo adventure last year as the culmination of one of my "COVID-era projects". Aaaaand, I knew almost nothing about style and layout. A year later, I know slightly more than nothing, enough to know some of my errors. :) Now I'm writing a 2nd RPG adventure and trying to learn as much as I can before I launch. For #3 I might actually hire an editor to improve the product. Thanks again, very informative Matthew!

Loved seeing you speak so passionately on a field I hardly even knew existed! I think a lot of people take typesetting for granted, but you've shown very clearly that a lot of work goes in to making our books look as great as they do.

I have made this video a favorite. Thank You!!

This is exactly the resource I've been looking for. I've recently stepped into the world of graphic design, partly because of things like this. Creating cool layouts and designs are awesome, but the fundamentals always seemed a bit obscured. Honestly, I have more questions than a simple comment on a video, but by all means, I eagerly await more of this sort of content. Thank you!

Great video. Always like crossing over profession with hobby. I've learned a lot of this kind of stuff working in writing the last few years and forget it's so easy to overlook for those who've never had to do it professionaly. Would love to see more like this.

I hope to write my own setting book some day, but it's early days and my players inform a lot of the lore and interesting tidbits in the world - so it's gonna be super collaborative. This video is so helpful, thanks!

Matthew, I really appreciate you bringing your expertise to bear in this video. I have plenty of material I would love to bring to the community, and the main barrier to accomplishing that for me has always been how to make it look good. I'm a words guy and a musician, without much in the way of artistic or design ability. So this was very helpful to me. Thanks and keep up the great work!

Absolute fantastic video, Matthew! I'm also in the process of writing my own campaign setting in InDesign and I'm still struggling with a few things that you might want to cover in a future video of this series: - picture wrapping (particularly alpha channel wrapping. I'm still manually deleting all the dots around the wrap, surely there's a better way via Photoshop) - table borders (how do you create those beautiful frames around a table that don't warp when you change the size of it?) - table of content (how to make it fully automated and neat looking) - structure (doesn't really belong to style but could be featured in a different series with guets maybe? How to set up a logical structure of a book) - page setup (how to properly set up the page size so you will have it properly printed and bound afterwards?) Looking forward to seeing more of this! Keep up your great work!

Wow, that was very educational. Thanks

Awesome video my dude! Would love to here about the differences between designing for PDF and Print. What are some things we should think about? For example, I know page bleed is a thing, but no real idea on how to work with it yet.

Dude, super helpful I would love more content like this.

I don’t even want to make something like this but you are really a great person for putting this resource together for people. Rad stuff Matty P.

Liked, subbed and saved! I'm starting my own RPG system in a golden age scifi setting and there's a lot of stuff here I never would have considered. Thanks for the info!

Appreciate the information, I'm very far along in my own RPG project. Though as a one man project so far, i've been having to learn every step myself.