#autonymus

The graphic design aesthetic for Autonymus is inspired by DOS and old Mac games, such as Cyan’s The Manhole

but mostly The Fool's Errand.

The font I use for Autonymus is the same as the one from The Fool's Errand. A big thank you to Francisco Beltrán https://arcade.itch.io/ for recreating the font!

For each panel, the text is arranged right from the begin, with the composition following after the positioning of text. To avoid confusion of what to read first, I try and arrange the text to flow from top-left, down. The text boxes are quit tight, and I try to avoid any overlap or parallel boxes, preferring to stack text boxes. After rendering the composition, I place a white transparent layer over the composition.

I then free hand sketch the boxes around the text. I try to keep the tails quite thin, with a couple of twists and kinks to them.

The aesthetic of the text boxes is inspired by speech scrolls from mediaeval illuminated manuscripts and art.

Speech scrolls in mediaeval art often follows the flow of the scroll within the design, but as I’m working digitally and with design restraints, I keep the text parallel, and the text boxes relatively square.

To keep things clear and consistent, I always have the tails come from behind the text box, folding from either left or right. also try and break up large text into multiple boxes to match the pace and cadence of the speech. The particular design of the text scroll came about gradually after drawing them over and over, seeing which designs work best both aesthetically and functionally for the comic.

I like the speech bubbles to be a lot crisper and clearer than the illustrations in the panel, both to contrast them, but also to make reading the text as easy as possible. So to do this, I "stoke" vector lines drawn using the pen tool, rather than leave it hand drawn.

To draw multiple independent line using the pen tool, I hit "a" on the keyboard to quickly bring up the "direct selection tool" and click anywhere on the canvas to de-select the current pen tool line. this allows you to make a new pen tool line.

I try and avoid perfectly straight lines, but I also need to keep it uniform and square.

once the pen tool lines are finished, I stroke them using a 1px pencil tool. The result are 90% perfect, but often corners need cleaning up.