This (very image-heavy) entry was inspired by an excellent article by Bulletmagnet in which he discusses the community that built up around the TripleTriadX.com site several years ago. He also explains that his own role in the community was primarily as a card maker.

I shared a similar experience in the same community. I too took an early interest in cardmaking. My very first pieces were saved as some proprietary format used by Microsoft’s now-defunct Picture-It Express. I would upload these bloated files and wonder to myself why they refused to show up online. Yup, I was an idiot, I know. The early stuff is long-lost to the ether, so I can’t show you any truly cringe-worthy stuff. I did manage to find some older, quite bad pieces, however:



Blurry, badly cut, badly positioned, slightly dodgy number placement, low image quality and the old, slightly wonky and unbalanced templates. Not actually that bad for the time they were made, but still, we’ve come a long way baby!

It didn’t take all that long for someone to redo the templates to clean up the wonky balance, grainy backgrounds and very rough numbers. They were then redone again several years later by a player with the username, Stoicism. his latest revamp is, in my opinion, the perfect interpretation of the classic FFVIII set, cleaning up our previous versions and giving up clearer, sharper templates for our cards. Here are a few later examples of my cards:



Now, as wonderful as the classic templates are, people began to get more adventurous, adapting and theming the templates and often going so far as to create their own from scratch. Some were very interesting, but most were just small changes to the existing templates. These adapted templates were often the worst and I decided that for my own attempts, I’d try to make then from scratch. It couldn’t be that difficult, could it? Here are a few of my earlier attempts at creating own template sets:



Yeah, ouch. Again, they aren’t really that bad, and I maintain that they’re a lot better than most others at the time, but I’m just not happy with how most turned out. The first of the above examples is rather boring, as I just started with a solid block and cut bits and pieces out until I had something I considered ‘cool’ at the time.

The second was a template for more difficult to cut images. Instead of cutting out an image and putting a coloured background behind it, I put coloured orbs on each side which would change between red and blue in the same way as the traditional backgrounds.

The third is one of several templates based on a series of Zelda wallpapers. The templates are nice, and I’m really happy with the backgrounds, but I’m not sure how practical this very thick border actually is, even though I spent a lot of time cutting it down from my original, much wider one. It’s also visually very ‘loud’ and distracting.

The fourth border, like the first, used no source images for the border. It’s completely original and very simple. I think it looks very good and the grey version is even better, but I had no examples of this handy. The background is also scratch made, using various photoshop filters to arrive at the effect. The set was intended for a Neverwinter Nights deck, hence the numbers using the NWN font.

As an aside, I took the templates from number four and the number set from three to have a little fun with Link:



Of all the custom templates, the most impressive was Kas’ Triple Triad Realms templates, created for use in a spinoff game combing classic Triple Triad gameplay with several RPG elements. I saw these templates and utterly adored them. Here are some of Kas’ original sample cards:



Amazing. These are still stunning templates and it’s real pity that the game did not get made. It did, however, inspire me not nlyto up my game in designing my own templates, but also to work towards my own spinoff site. At the birth of TTX there was a short-lived sister site, mainly used to test code before it got added to TTX, called TTMon, based on Pokemon and general anime. I actually preferred this site to TTX, mainly because the site had a more open, minimalist design built on white, rather than black. It used the classic TT templates. I do not have any cards from the original site, but I do have a standard template card I made a few years later, just to give you an idea of how they looked:



They look ok, but in working to relaunch TTMon, I decided that custom templates would help set the site apart from the parent site TTX and establish a unique look for the game. I knocked together some rough ideas, but it was actually a patterned desktop wallpaper created by Moonlady, one of the TTX admins, that really got me going. I used this patterned background for my own card backgrounds and to texture the borders. It was a simple pattern and produced some basic templates that although quite primitive compared to later incarnations, were well received by the community:



Basic but functional. I was quite happy with the borders and backgrounds, but was not particularly happy with the numbers or the elements. I resolved to make the numbers more characterful and to design a new set of elemental symbols. The next template sheet demonstrates these new components:



Oh. My. God. Those elements are so fugly. The numbers I love, and apart from some slight adjustment, they remain the same to the final templates, but those elements are just hideous. I have no idea why I kept them around for so long. Look at the ghost one! It’s like a fried egg! Another issue was that everything was so flat. There was no depth to the cards, which didn’t work well with my intention of adding overlaps to the edges of the cards. I was trying to imply depth through the overlaps and it did not look quite right. As such, my next step involved adding a little more detail to the borders themselves:



The lower two borders, those for card levels one to five and six to seven, were thinned slightly and give a slight bevel to imply depth. The upper templates were completely redesigned, drawing on the experience and feedback I had accrued in developing and presenting the earlier versions. The most work was put into the level ten border with the large embedded pokeball. I was extremely happy with these new templates and turned my attention to the elements and backgrounds. The elements I’d designed were, frankly, awful. I tried, but could not come up with anything better. In the end, I went through the mini sprites and picked out a selection of Pokemon who, to me, best represented each of the elements. Pikachu for thunder, Koffing for poison, Dragonite for dragon and so on. The backgrounds used the same source image, but zoomed out a little further to give a slightly more complex, higher resolution image. These were more visually pleasing on their own, but as part of a card, they were too ‘busy’ and distracted from the subject image. I decided to try a new source image:



The starry sky background was a big breakthrough. It really made some nice looking cards, was simple yet interesting, and just looked damn good:



I was pleased with this but there were a couple of issues raised in feedback. Fist, the image is a little dark in places. The Pokemon that took up a lot of space tended to be quite difficult to discern identify as red or blue due to only dark areas being visible. The white dots also made it often look as though the subject image was badly cut out with bits of background still stuck to the edges. My solution was actually to remake (not reuse, but remake at higher quality) my Neverwinter Nights set background as seen earlier in this post:



And there, done, I was happy. It only took about three and a half (probably more) years of tinkering and starting and restarting the actual deck, but I had templates I was happy with. I did tinker a little further, adding a Limited Edition template fixture and playing with the idea of using the pictured Pokemon’s own mini sprite and showing element via the three-letter element code used in the actual videogame:



The change to the elements was still not definite when I finally gave up on the deck. This happened shortly after our then-parent site TTv3 shut down It was a real pity that it shut down as v3 was the last good, innovative and well-intentioned TT site and on going under, it took with it three sub-sites, including TTMon.

We did consider trying to branch out on our own, but I’m no coder and had already decided it was time to move on. Before I end this, I have two last things to cover. One is the adaptability of my templates, and the other is the branding of TTMon.

The templates were designed to be used on a site featuring not only Pokemon cards, but cards featuring other games and cartoons. Here are a couple of the alternative versions I produced as experiments (ignore the text on Dende, that was for someone’s sig):



I was very pleased with the flexibility of the templates and I was rather looking forward to playing around with different themes for different decks.

I’m not going to comment too much on our branding/site design, but I do still have a few images showing the evolution of our branding from the early, banner through to the late development forums and the idea for a renamed site:









TT Chikara was intended to take the ‘Mon’ out of the title, separating us from the idea of a pokemon-exclusive site.

I hope this has been somewhat interesting and sorry it’s been so image-heavy.

CIAO