Working on my Zombies!!! game variant again, this time focusing on character cards. This is where you'll keep track of your health, items, and ammo. I first started out with some sketches:

As you can see, I had several ideas and concepts. I finally settled on the bottom sketch and got to work on translating it to Illustrator:

Why Illustrator and not Photoshop? This was just a preliminary layout- nothing was 100%. I wanted to make sure I liked the placement of each section and that smaller tiles (called chits) would make sense as well. From this example I learned that swiping chits off the bottom would work great for the health (lifeline bar) section, but not for the ammo located at the top. I changed this layout so that each would be placed at the bottom and players would have a clear indication of how much health and bullet chits their player had left. I realized too, that there is a place for the guns (in between the ammo and health) but there isn't a space for the melee weapons. Hmmm.....after more sketching I had a solution. I did another quick test in Illustrator and moved it into Photoshop. Here is my completed card:

In staying true to the grim and grit that is Left 4 Dead, I used grunge brushes created from friend Dan to 'rust up' the clean look of the lines and used the logo's blood splatter as a graphic behind the character's profile. I then placed both logos of the games on the card and left two spaces at the top. One for the melee weapon and the other for the gun type. In a future post I show how all the remaining items look on the final printed piece. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I can't wait to start play testing again!