OK, lets start a proper thread for discussing his new tokens.

His original 300dpi PSD file is uploaded to the contributed section of the archive.

I've then exported his illustrations and put them into my template. Both the svg/png sources and png pages can be found in the counters section of the archive.

When we are done, the mapboard and playermats have to be updated as well, but that's not necessary for this first draft.

Overall I'm impressed, but just as with Flo's illustrations, I have lots of small beefs, of which at least some have to be addressed before these go official.

First some general comments:

I noticed that while most illustrations was either all black and dark grey (on light backgrounds) or white and dark grey (on dark background) as before, a few illustrations covered the entire black to white spectrum. There is two problems with these. Firstly, they don't match the other illustrations, and secondly, they severely limits what backgrounds can be used for those illustrations. Imho the Assyrian and Maurian cities and tokens is the worst looking of these.

You are very inconsistent with what you do with the sails on the ships. Some ships have transparent sails, some have the foreground coloured sails, and some have the inverted foreground coloured sails. This makes the ships looks really bad when putting them next to each other. All the original ships (in AdvCiv) has transparent sails, and that is what I would prefer if the CivProject ships also had.

Also, I think there is too much black and grey on the backside urns, making the national colour appear darker and less unsaturated. I would prefer if this illustration could be cleared up , removing most of the greyed, leaving more of the original background colour

Then some comments on the individual illustrations:

The Indus token illustration has four distinct symbols, while all other has either a single symbol (or two identical ones in the case of the Persian tokens). I don't know if this is a problem per se, but it sure does look busy. Perhaps one can remove the small symbols and only leave the large one (a cow I assume).

The Kushan token looks almost photorealistic and don't fit well with the other tokens.

The Parthian illustrations have the wrong foreground colour. Should be white.

The Persian city illustration looks far to simple and childlike compared to the other illustrations.

Also, as a minor side-note, I don't quite like the new Egyptian city illustration, but I guess that's just my personal taste. There is nothing directly wrong with it.

And finally over to the colour issues:

Carthage: You are right that the current brown is slightly red. I've never felt it to be a big problem, but I've nothing against fixing it. However, the colour you suggested looks more like tan then brown to me. So I suggest sRGB(139,69,19) instead, which is what I used in my template downloadable above.

Egypt: I don't see why Egypt should have a so much lighter colour. Also thing your suggested colour looks to watered down.

Minoa: I agree that a lighter green colour closer to the original Crete is advisable, but yet again I think your suggestion looks too watered down. So I took your suggestion, increased the saturation significantly, reduced the value slightly, and moved to a slightly less yellow hue, ending up with sRGB(76,212,57), which I used in my template. What do you think?

Ok, you want opinions

First let me say I like the overall work. Gret Job Craig!

What my problems are:

I just don't like some tokens to have grayscale and other purely black (or another single color). Also i'm not very font of using white highlights.
This goes for all units.

I would fix all this, like in my example:


I'm willing to do this for you, but I need a much higher resolution to work with.

Then for all civ indivitually:

Assyria: Ok, bu I'd prefer current ships
Babylon: OK, but I'd prefer current ships
Barbarian: Ships are nice but just fun like mentioned earlier. Why are they black where Persia is black allready. That's why I made them white, (eventhough Jolly roger would look better in white on black.)
Carthage: Ok, but I miss some details in all tokens
Celts: Ok, but I miss some details in all tokens
Dravidia: OK, but I'd like the units to look like the cities
Egypt: Fine, but isn't there a better city-option?
Hatti: OK
Hellas: I miss some details on the units only.
Iberia: I miss some details on the units only.
Indus: I'd remove the drawings above the cow. The line in the cow are too wide to me. (like a brush in a drawing program).
Kushan: I don't like the units, the cities and ships are ok.
Maurya: I don't like the units, the cities and ships are ok.
Minoan: I'd remove the person standing on the bull. I'd like a part of the knossos palace for city better than this image. (like Babylon's Ziggurat)
Nubia: Ok, but I miss some details in all tokens
Pathia: OK
Persia: the city looks like a child drawing on a commodore64. I'd replace it.
Rome: Ok, but I miss some details in all tokens
Saba: I don't like the city and remove the clouds from the units' shields




I'm interested in a list of all units' historrical background, just to know what they are.



For the background, in either case (coins or vessels) I'd prefer an image with no grayscale. I like the current vessels much more than your version.

I've only got what I linked to in my previous post, but Craig has 600dpi versions (that I'd like to have too, but he never uploaded )

When I'm talking about more details, I mean something like this:



Also, I'd like to do this for you, but I need higher resolution and don't give me timepressure.


Thinking about the Barbarian/Persia thing:

I would remove the black from persia, giving it Kushan purple.
(I never liked the black for normal tokens after all)
(I really like Persia to have purple, don't know why)
Then give Kushan an new colour (no black, No white)
Maybe Saba should have a little color change.




Then use black for Barbarian. Those look good.

I made an example for a color option:

Persia

Kushan





I general when talking about colors to print, we'd better work in CMYK instead of RGB. My printer prints in CMYK for example. RGB are only monitor colors.

Personally, I prefer the barbarians white with black foreground, but I'm not married to it.

No time pleasures, better late than never...

Regarding details, contact Craig to see what he got, I can't help you there.

and regarding RGB vs CMYK:
There is no such thing as RGB or CMYK !!!.
There is sRGB, Adobe RGB, Adobe Wide RGB, Apple RGB, Adobe Illustrator CMYK, 4 C Ctd. TRUMATCH RIT CMYK, ColorMatch 3.01 SWOP Ink CMYK, Japan Standard v2 CMYK, Sep Euro GCR300 CMYK, Sep Euro UCR340 CMYK, SWOP Sep GCR370 CMYK, SWOP Sep UCR315 CMYK, U.S. Sheetfed Coated v2 CMYK, U.S. Sheetfed Uncoated v2 CMYK, U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 CMYK, U.S. Web Uncoated v2 CMYK etc

While nowadays sRGB has become a universally supported standard, there is no universally supported CMYK standard. Additionally, no commodity printers actually print using any CMYK standard, but uses it's own version of CMYK, depending on print engine and ink or toner used. So, while both my printer and your printer uses a CMYK profile, they most likely do not use the same CMYK profile (unless you happen to have a HP Officejet Pro K5400 series printer).

So, no matter what we use, the printer (or printer driver) has to convert it to whatever is used internally by the printer. And the only colour profile every single printer in existence knows how to convert from is sRGB. Of course some printers is better on this conversion than others, but all printers at least try to convert sRGB, while most only passing through CMYK unconverted, no matter which CMYK it was used (of course most printers will treat any RGB profile as sRGB when it convert it, so using, say, Adobe RGB will be just as bad as using, say, Sep Euro GCR300 CMYK, with commodity printers).

In fact, once upon a time the map did use Adobe Illustrator CMYK, which resulted in visually different printouts depending if one used Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Reader to print the map, even if one used the same computer and the same printer. It was only after we used Adobe Illustrator to convert it to sRGB we got the correct printouts when printing with Adobe Reader...

well hey don't get mad.

I never spoke about a general RGB or general CMYK standard.

But when you define colors in RBG and the result is printed in CMYK, there is a difference.

Where a good printer should reach a defined CMYK color. ofcourse results may vary, but this can never apply to the use of CMYK instead of RGB.

There are color-samples that you can hold next to a print to say if it's the right color. A professional printer or print-shop should check these. He can never match with RGB.

Your home printer is a choice and gets a certain result. Though you deny a printshop's quality by holding a CMYK-sample next to the result and say the color isn't right. They have to reprint until the result is good.
When you have used RGB they can say: "monitors' colors vary' and that's it.


There are very different CMYK's indeed. All of which are samples available.
You just don't put computer-screens next to eachother to check the difference in color.

I'm not mad, just a bit frustrated. You are not the first stating that one should use CKYK rather than RGB, and historically most have turned out not to actually know what a colour profile is, which is sort of a requirement to understand the issue.

When specifying a colour it don't really matter what colour profile you use, as long as you specify which colour profile you use, as it is always possible to convert between them. Of course the programs used must know about the colour profiles to convert between them, and sRGB is the only colour profile that every single program out there knows about...

BTW, there are printed samples for sRGB values as well, I've seen them in a print shop, so that's no argument...

And if you ever go to a print shop, and they don't handle sRGB (which I've not heard about for the last 10 years or so), just ask them what CMYK they want and convert the PDF to that before giving it to them.

As not all print shops use the same CMYK, there is a significant chance that either they or you will have to convert the documents anyway, so saving with a CMYK colour profile don't give any real advantage, and in the meantime sRGB gives less problems, as that is the most universally supported colour profile for printing (even though no printer actually prints in sRGB).

Ok well, what you like.

I've experienced differently during my job where customers demand exact colors and even pantone colors. Using RGB there gives problems during converting.

If you wanna use RGB, that's fine, it's not THAT much of an issue.

Well, you wanted new artwork, you have it. Some of the items I wasn't too happy with either. But...

There was very little available for Kushan. The 'head' on the people token is their first emperor. I have his name at home somewhere. The Persian city is actually just a single dragon tooth that lined their walls and towers, there was no available persian city or gate image that was disernable between Babylonian or Assyrian. The Indus cow was taken from a Harrapan seal and I felt the inscriptions were necessary to give them a true Indus feel. I made the extra effort to add the fish symbol inplace of one that was on it already. I would definitely keep it the way it is. As for the ships, there are numerious Arabian Dhows on many of the tokens, there isn't much way around that. For Babylonian and Assyrian they are the same image, as are Hatti and Persia (a Phonetian galley) The Parthian city image was taken from one of their temples. I thought it looked a bit bare, but I tried to keep to historical art as much as possible. The Iberian soldier has a hatch pattern on the shield that probably needs to be done better, even at 600 dpi gets lost. The roman soldier also needs some lines added to it like the Carthage elephant. Flo did an excellend job with it. I was under a dead line to have these ready by May 1, and they were.

Please do not jam these images back on that old template, with the city circles right next to each other I can't use a die press to cut them, the punches have 1/8 inch outer diameter and I need a 1/4 inch between the citys on the page. 55 population tokens should be MAX anyway.

I will compile a list of where the art came from for historical purposes, so you can think twice about radical changes to them. I admit that black white and the civ color can be a bit busy for some people, but it was something different to consider just like the coin options on the backs.

I will be happy to provide Flo a 600dpi original image to work from, including my work files - providing 2 things - the 600dpi art is not made available to any printer or for general public, 300dpi is what was agreed for that. #2 I get Flo's 600dpi art back to print for my customers. That is the only monopoly I want is to print the 600dpi tokens.

Hmmm, Jonno and Flo must be debating the deal.

Well, it took them 3 freekin weeks just to review the file. I wouldn't expect anything fast.

Hey

it took me 15 minutes to review the file, I just got it 3 weeks after you uploaded it I guess.

Sorry, as I stated in en email to you, some real life issues occurred, which resulted in one two weekends when I couldn't spend any time on CivProject, resulting in a two week delay on posting the file. Then it took us less than a day to discuss it, and now I've been waiting for another week for you and Flo to negotiate the terms for him continuing on your 600dpi work.

I've not said anything during this time because I have nothing to add to the discussion, it's up to you to solve any difficulties between yourself any way you want to.

no problems


I've got the file. This week is kinda busy for me, so I guess I wont be doing anything on Civproject. the weekend I wont be home either.

I have two weeks after that and then I'm going on holiday for two weeks.
I think I'll be doing most work after my holiday.

so please dont push

No rush, but thanks for the heads up on the schedule.