Visual Information Portfolio

Twenty-five sheets, one topic each, all built on the same template: the same header lockup, numbered sections read top to bottom, and the five Element colors meaning the same thing on every page they appear. Once you’ve learned to read one sheet, you can read all of them. Each is letter-size and rendered at 600 dpi, so it works as a printed handout at the table and as a screen reference.

Everything else on this page is in 20 Below’s own style. This is the other half of the job: working inside someone else’s brand standard. One topic, hurricane-season preparedness, is drawn as three pieces: a data chart, a process timeline and a checklist. Each piece is then redrawn for four owners: a federal agency on the U.S. Web Design System, a company on IBM’s Carbon Design System, my film studio Savage Light Studios, and a community clinic in a plain-language health style. The facts never change between versions; they come from the National Hurricane Center and Ready.gov. What changes is the type, the color, the structure and the voice. The agency, company and clinic are fictional, so no real organization’s identity is borrowed. How it was built is in the case study, Four Owners, One Storm.

The same six wind-speed ranges and the same National Hurricane Center damage wording in every version. Each chart is a floating range bar on one axis, with the bar colors stepped through that brand’s own ramp, and every step checked to 3:1 contrast against its page.

Four stages with the same NHC timing: a watch about 48 hours before tropical-storm-force winds, a warning about 36 hours before. The structure changes with the reader: a numbered process list for the public, progress tiles and an owner list for site leads, a stripboard for a film crew, and four large step cards for patients.

Ready.gov’s basic kit in every version, plus one group that belongs to the reader: pets and family for the public, remote work for employees, the production’s paperwork and drives for a crew, and medicines and medical devices for patients, placed first.

The same facts, carried into the formats each owner would actually publish: a public poster for the agency, a folded patient brochure for the clinic and a briefing deck for the company. Each is a print-size PDF with tagged structure, a document language and a title, so screen readers can follow it.

The same brand work, moving. These are logo reveals and brand animations I designed and animated in After Effects, from my own studio’s mark to other brands. Each opens on YouTube.

The sheets are for the table. These came first. They’re the working diagrams the system was designed and built from: the probabilities, the order of operations, the numbers the apps had to agree with, drawn plainly enough to check. There are twenty-two of them, and they still sit in the rulebook where the prose stops working. Each one is a single SVG in the site’s own colors, with written alt text so the rule survives for readers who can’t see the picture.

Same information, two jobs. The design data had to be right. The finished piece has to be read across a table, mid-fight, by someone who has never seen the rulebook. That means the same numbered panels, the same colors doing the same work as every other reference sheet, and the rule written out in full where the source only had to hint at it. Each one is chosen case by case as the book is prepared for print.

This one took three steps, because the first honest answer wasn’t the clearest one. The exact odds, computed from every possible roll, come out as two charts and 114 values, and they’re true: Advantage and Disadvantage don’t just slide the curve, they narrow it and tip it to one side. But as a visual presentation, the full data set isn’t always clear to the average reader, and what a player needs from it is one idea: an extra die moves your odds about two and a half points. So the book’s version draws that idea and nothing else, keeping the centres exact and letting the shapes simplify. The finished sheet keeps those same simple curves, on purpose: visual information has to be easy to read first, and it doesn’t have to carry every decimal to be right about what matters. The exact numbers still come through where a player uses them, as the chance to succeed.

The design data answers one question: what does each Index add? That’s the rule, but it isn’t the decision a player is making. At the table the question is whether this ask, at this Level, is worth the roll. So the finished sheet keeps the bars, colors them from easy to hard, and adds the answer as a grid: the chance to succeed for every Level and Index, with the asks that reach past your means marked and the ones too far to try left blank. It also turned up the pattern the bars hide: asking at your own Level is always a 45% roll.

The design data draws the rule as structure: one Skill, five Elements, a solid line to the default and dashed lines to the rest. That’s accurate, and it’s enough for someone building the system. A player needs the procedure. So the finished sheet keeps the fan, in each Element’s own color, and then walks one roll through it: start on the default, challenge it with a Descriptor you already have, and remember it only counts for this roll. The example uses the book’s own sample Descriptors, so a player can see the argument made before they have to make one. What each pairing actually looks like is left to the Elements × Skills sheet, so the two don’t repeat each other.

This one didn’t exist until an audit said it should. Planning a quick-reference pamphlet meant checking every rule a player looks up mid-session against the sheets already made, and one question had no answer anywhere: how many dice do I roll? Taking Damage starts after the dice are thrown. So the attack got the same two passes as everything else: first as design data, drawn plainly enough to check every branch against the rulebook, then as a finished sheet. The first pass also caught a contradiction in the book itself, one paragraph that swaps which wall social and mental dice meet, and the sheet follows the three places that agree.

The second gap from the audit. The design data had the core of it right: a Gift doesn’t add a stat, it reaches for three tools the game already has. What it didn’t show is how those tools behave over a session. The Gift Check rolls against your current Ki, not your maximum, so the same Gift that never misses in the morning starts failing by the evening. On the finished sheet that’s one row of numbers, 90% at 16 Ki down to 6% at 4. Around it are the rest of what a player reaches for: the five Levels, the attack dice formula with the book’s own worked example, and what Adders and Limiters do.

The third gap from the audit, and the one that changed the game while it was being drawn. The first pass put the damage ladder, range and armor on one page, and in doing so found that the book both capped weapons at 5 dice and listed a special weapon at 6. It now says “ordinary weapons,” and the ladder shows special weaponry above them in the NPC color, since that’s who carries it. The armor panel then grew. The game designers wanted called shots to reach more than the head, so armor went from two Zones to four: Center of Mass, Head, Arms and Legs. Every armor item was mapped to the Zones it covers, and the rules, the book, the character sheet and this sheet were all updated together.

The fourth gap. The book already had falling, fire, drowning and the cold the game is named after, but the rules file the apps read was still using older, bigger numbers. Drawing both side by side made the mismatch obvious. The sheet follows the book, which fits the 5-dice cap on ordinary weapons. Then came mining sources for the hazards the game didn’t have yet. The pattern that recurred most, a place or thing that slowly changes the people near it, became Corruption: a five-level track resisted by Klotho, where each level is harder to clear than the last. Venom joined it, as one standard rule for every poison. The same pass caught the Brown Recluse’s untested venom, which became its own case study.

The last gap. Every timing rule in the game was already written down, but spread across half a dozen chapters: bleeding per round, cold water per minute, Fate Tokens per scene, venom per day. The design data put them all on one ladder, and the ladder turned out to be missing a rung. Rests and weather both counted in hours, but Hour wasn’t one of the official Time Bands. It is now, along with Decade and Century, and the rules, the glossary and the book were updated to match. The finished sheet answers the two questions players actually ask: how long something lasts, and what comes back when they rest.