July 14, 2024: Questions Three: Nikki Vrtis

With combined editor and production-artist credits that exceed 400 projects just for Steve Jackson Games, Nikki Vrtis has been a force for gaming goodness since her days at West End Games in the early 2000s. If you've picked up a GURPS project in the past 16 years, the odds are incredible that her name's in there somewhere.

Nikki recently took some time away from her latest batch of projects to answer this installment's Questions Three.

You're rare in the SJ Games pantheon for having extensive experience with both editing and graphic design. What's something your myriad skills let you bring to GURPS?

I work with just about every aspect of book production: editing, layout, art selection, indexing, cover design, supplemental writing, preparing files for print. This helps me to get projects done faster and sometimes do more interesting things to the layout than I could otherwise. As the layout artist, if I see something weird with the order of sections, I can get an immediate answer from the editor (for books where I handled that role). As I select art, I can ask the layout artist to swap quote and art boxes based on what I have at hand, and the person knows exactly what I'm talking about (because it's all me).

Production is one of those aspects where it's sometimes only noticeable if it's done poorly. Are there any interesting elements or aspects of what you do that folks might not notice consciously, but are neat if you point them out?

The most obvious interesting layout feature that I do is prioritize putting text boxes on the outside of two-page spreads, so that if a reader were to print and bind the book as normal, they could quickly find these neat bits of information. A more subtle technique is that I try to make sure that sentences begin and end on the same page. Of the hundreds of supplements that I've laid out, only a couple have one or two sentences in them that are split from one page to the next (generally because I could not find a way to prevent it without violating some other, higher-level rule that I've set for my layouts).

What's the coolest project you've gotten to work on?

Of course, it's the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game! Budget constraints and project parameters dictated certain aspects of it, so I had to be particularly creative in how I laid it out. Plus, I decided on the design for the front and back covers of each book, and I incorporated some worksheets similar to ones that I've found helpful as a Game Master. I also have fun getting projects ready for the print-on-demand market, including GURPS Meta-Tech, which is being released as a PDF and POD supplement at about the same time as this interview!

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And with that, Nikki went back to work on her latest top-secret project, debating in her office with a half-dozen other co-workers who were also her . . .

-- Nikki Vrtis, interviewed by Steven Marsh