Hello Joshua and all,

I hope the studio is open.  I have finished the first pass of the layout for my Spirit of the Century "module" and would greatly appreciate some feedback.

My motivation for doing this is threefold: to properly archive adventures I have created and run and to share them with others and to learn some design.  I run a lot of one shots and a great deal of prep goes into them.  If they are good enough, I'l take feedback from the players and rework it and run it again.  However, I have a collection of adventures that are a bunch of sheets, notes, characters and so on all collected in a folder and I find it disatisfying.  It doesn't feel complete.  So I figured I could design them into a single, easily distributable package, then I could keep them in a neat, archivable and easily accessible format for myself and possibly for others.

I chose to go with 7" x 8.5" size because it makes a small booklet and can be printed out by anyone with access to a printer that does 8.5" x 14".  If you can do it double-sided, then you can print out the spreads and have yourself a proper book.

Currently, the image on the front cover is just a stand-in.  I have an illustrator friend who is drawing the climactic scene for the cover.  The info on the inside front cover is also not complete.  The rest of the text is complete.  I'm looking specifically for critique on the layout design, but if anything jumps out at you in the text or the overall adventure, I am open to hearing about it.

You can find the pdf here.

I guess I should respond here point by point?

1. Paper size, simply because we have way too much 8.5 x 14 paper in the office where I work, so it's okay to use some of it for personal reasons.  I played around with it and tabloid and found tabloid way too big and this size seemed to work with the content I had.  I find it looks okay printed out, a nice size to hold and flip through.
2. The colophon at this point is not done.  I stuck the url's in there simply to not forget them.  I guess I should really put it together.  It's just that I wasn't sure about the content.  Is there a boilerplate or some kind of standard for colophons?  Point taken about the indent; I probably won't put one in.
3. Thanks on the use of caps!  They aren't "true" small caps in the titles, though that could be an option in the typeface.  I need to look into that.
4. Nice call on Rastopopolous!  You got it. :)
5. I don't think I do need the boxes, but I wasn't sure how to make the data stand out a bit from the text.  I'll try with just space or perhaps only horizontal lines.  I think you are right about the cramping.
6. I'll try it with a bit more space.  I really didn't do much with leading.  Learning about that and spacing (kerning?) is my next step.
7. I have succeeded in outputting it in booklet form.  Would it be helpful if I put a pdf of that up so people can print it out themselves?  The spread in the middle looks quite cool across a single page, I found.
8. Margins and gutter: I didn't   I just went with the defaults.  It all seems so subtle and I have no knowledge or guidelines.  
9. No, I haven't gone without hyphens.  I think that would then require a bit of manual kerning to make it all fit nicely, no?
10. For the ornament, I just was looking for some ways to add some art to the document as it seemed a bit dry and text-heavy.  I was going to do it at the end of each section, but the text filled up a lot of that space, so I think I might just take it out now.