STUDIO BLOG: Making Toe Beans

Welcome to a new series of blog posts from the Fistful team (Frey/Steph & Logan)! We plan to blog about the projects we make in our little studio, offer reviews for indie games we’ve purchased and loved and give out advice in our expertise areas of design, illustration and printing. 
The first of these features the ‘first’ project we made together, our popular magical cat café for D&D 5e, Toe Beans! 

MAKING TOE BEANS 
By Frey 

Initial Concepts 
Toe Beans was the second project I took on after creating Fistful of Crits with my business partner Logan and the first ‘module’ I had ever created that didn’t have the express purpose of being a mess behind my own DM screen. What started out in early stages as a small booklet with a printable menu ended up running away with me into something much bigger in concept for what we wanted to release.  
For those interested, here is a retrospective into the design, writing and creation of Toe Beans as someone who was new this year into the TTRPG community and hadn’t released anything like it before. 

Ummm....A Cat Café 
The idea for the cat café came after a prompt from @tavernstories on twitter, where he asked something along the lines of: if you could have any business in a D&D world, what would it be? I’m a huge lover of cats, and in D&D, all things wizard. It made sense to me that a cat café with magical cat waiters could be the perfect place for an arcane academic to spend a bit of downtime (my old PC, coincidentally, was a Wizard with a Tressym familiar, so I clearly lean in a certain direction!) I was super new to the community, but a bunch of people replied to ask if I was making it. 
So I got to work! 

Before I started sketching anything up, I had to make a few decisions about the way the project was going to go. Did I want it to be super cute and ‘bubblegum pop’ or something more along the lines of Le Chat Noir and Art Deco, Nouveau? It’s important to have a good idea of different design approaches and ages to help inform the story you want to tell. Colour palette design can really help in the decision making process, so this is the first thing I went to.

Colour Palettes
One of the things that has become really signature in my design approach in the last few years is limited colour palettes. I knew I wanted something that felt a little different from typical pastel cute colours. I spent my initial research phase nose deep in experimenting with colours and finally landed on a blend of pink and teal. I've added in the colour palettes below so you can see how I got to the end result!

Alt Image text:
'1.Persian Grey, like early grey colour schemes. Yellow as the 'pop' colour.'
'2. A tabby cat colour? Nervous about browns though.'
'3. Cute colour palette. Yellows/oranges just not working for me though.'
'4. Mixing the pinks and greens, surprised that it looks quite nice together.'
'5. Tweaked colour temps down to something less in your face bright. Loved how it looked layered. Colour palette found!'

Pink is still cute, but the teal is darker and really made the pinker tones stand out more (or ‘pop’ if you like, but rarely say that to a designer’s face). I personally use the approach that sometimes too many colours can get in the way of things standing out, especially in a market saturated with heavily illustrated covers. I ended up with a smaller limit then I started out with, but that's easier to work with. You might see later I end up using some of these colour palettes for other things, so it was good to spend time refining them down.

Starting Design 
I like to start my mind mapping on A4 printer paper - it encourages me to be less precious about getting the information down in a presentable way. You can see here I was thinking about colours, possible brand names and tag lines and what we actually wanted to design as part of the project - the receipt item cards would later become the special blends and the tote became a magical item as well as part of the physical offering. (A note mapped on the top half of the page, worked on a new sheet and then filled the bottom half of the map page with work I had developed after and was then in the process of refining. I'm just....messy and don't like to waste paper, y'all)
In talks, we wanted to define WHY we were making the product too. We decided on the following:

• We wanted the option of an interesting change to 'starting in a tavern'.
• Something cute, though not overly saccharine.
• I love table props so really wanted to develop for that. We decided early on to make the booklet a menu shape and leaned hard into the menu concept (as it's also the sort of designing Logan does on his side of the business!)
• Something easy and loose as an option for first time DM's - so it had to cover running an NPC, magic items and some easy to read stat blocks.
• The idea of making shopping episodes fun, and part of the world - so much so that players might want to make repeat visits for rewards. (The loyalty cards came out of this, like real coffee shops)

Research 
One thing that can help inform direction is extensive research into what is already out there. For one thing, you don’t want to design something identical to something else without realising. I’ve also had many experiences as a designer where I thought I wanted to go a certain way but saw something that blew me away and inspired me to change direction.  
Cat café logos are similar, in all honesty. I wasn’t thrilled with what I’d come across, but I did take notice of a few where different elements had been played with and took that forward into my initial sketching. 

At this point, I wasn’t sure of the name; I only knew I wanted it to be relevant to whatever logo I designed and maybe a little pun-ny. I tried lots of different variations, making notes for myself as I went along. I think it’s important to stress in the age of perfect sketchbook tours that its ok and necessary to make a mess or experiment at this stage. 

The small x's are just notes for myself about elements I didn't want to take forward. Following this I went back to the bottom half of the first sheet and refined the ones I wanted to take forward. I was using Toe's Beans until the last second, where I realised dropping the 's just sounded nicer.