Trading Cards! (Sorry, not a droid)

[savagecreature]

It does look great! Nice looking Droid, that Arty.

[Dyne]

Since I use Inkscape for vector images, and I've been wanting to make cards for whichever droids I end up taking to Dragon Con, I've started to set these up the way I like to work.  So far I've only done the two front sides (portrait and landscape).

The SVG files are here for Portrait, and for Landscape.  Feel free to put them in the gallery or something.

Edit: I've added the reverse side of the card, here, as well as a variant of the portrait image with different colors because I like to differentiate my "droid" cards from my "random image" series.  I've also switched to using Dxx numbers for my droid cards.



Some slight tweaks have been made to fix some minor issues from import.

The biggest is that the red bits of the explosion were imported as an image pattern with what I assume is an intentional subtle color variation noise for realism (similar to sampling the paper that you mentioned), but it also came with some thin vertical transparent stripes that clearly weren't there in the original.  (The paper texture on the reverse side has a similar issue.)

To fix that here, I could've just made the explosion shape a solid color fill.  In the interests of preserving the grain pattern, though, I instead stuck a solid red duplicate behind it so that that only shows through the gaps.  With the red being taken from the existing pattern, the color match is close enough that you can barely tell it was there unless you know to look for it, even when zoomed in.

I could get even more clever (reproducing it in Inkscape, or using an offset duplicate of the pattern and some clipping to conform it to the shape, or just getting a copy of the original pattern as a PNG and using that).  But this works well enough I am not too worried about it.


In any case, the files are set up in a specific way, described below.  For my first attempt at an LD-F1 card, I made this:



As you can see on the right, there are three layers.  I keep these locked unless I'm actively editing them, so I won't accidentally drag around the wrong part of the file or something.  Even when editing, I try to remember to only unlock one layer at a time.

1: The topmost "Text" layer consists of two groups: the first contains the explosion, logo, card number, etc.  The other group contains the main text and the blue background behind it that blots out the white stars for legibility.  You enter a group by double-clicking on one of the objects inside it, and you exit by clicking outside the group.


2: Moving down to the second layer, it consists of one group that holds the card border stuff (the blue/white stars border and the black/white framing around the image).  There is a normally-hidden Clip mask applied to this group that effectively makes the area where the photo goes transparent, letting the third layer show through.

You shouldn't need to change anything on the second layer (unless you want a different card background or something), but if you do want to reveal the clip for some reason, in Inkscape you'd go to "Object > Clip > Release" (or use the context menu).  A magenta rectangle conforming to the space inside the innermost black border will then appear.  You probably don't want to move this around, as it needs to be aligned properly to the frame.

To restore the Clip to its normally-hidden (active) state, select both the magenta rectangle and the group containing the card stuff, then do "Object > Clip > Set Inverse (LPE)". (You use Inverse because clipping normally would hide everything in the affected group that's outside the magenta area.  We're trying to make a hole for the photo, so we instead want our clip to hide everything in the affected group that's beneath the magenta.)


3: Finally, the "Image" layer is where the actual photograph lives.  Much like the layer above, it has a normally-hidden clip, but in this case that's so the photo doesn't extend past the borders of the card, since it might be too large once you get the scale and composition you want.  The clip here works the same way as the one on layer 2, except instead of using "Set Inverse (LPE)" to activate this clip, you'd just use "Set".  On the photograph, we're not using it to make a hole, we're trimming off the edges that we don't need.


The workflow here is to go to Layer 3 and import your photo.  Then use page up to put the photo object in the foreground so that the magenta clip rectangle doesn't conceal it.  Move and scale the photo until you get the composition that you want within the card's frame.  Next, use Page Down to put the photo object behind the magenta rectangle.  

If I hide the top two layers, this is what the third layer of the LD-F1 card shown above would look like at this stage (note that the photo extends above and below the thin grey border that represents the outer edge of the card -- this is why I'm clipping it):


Once the image is behind the magenta rectangle, select both the rectangle and the photo, and use "Object > Clip > Set" to activate the clip.

Then you lock layer 3, unlock layer 1, and go into the groups there to edit the text and card number.  Finally, you can export your card.


This is the differently colored variant: