RE: My fakes
I saw the type symbols and wondered why they looked so weird, then I noticed you were using my spoof blanks. XD
My first suggestion is that you don't use these blanks if you're making serious cards. These blanks are made for joke cards with simple, funny illustrations. If you're going to be making serious cards with this kind of artwork, use
these or some other normal blanks instead.
My second suggestion is to add a white stroke or a small, hard glow around the text. This can easily be done in Photoshop using Layer Styles (accessed at the bottom of the Layers panel, the "fx" button). This will make the text pop out more, making it easier to read. Also, you may want to look up some font guides or, at the very least, compare your text to real cards. Make a note of what words should be capitalized or italicized. Of course, you as the faker have the artistic license to use whatever fonts you like, but a bold type really isn't a good choice for smaller text (attack descriptions). It makes it more difficult to read and breaks the hierarchy by not contrasting from the attack name. Don't let that get you down, though - some of my earlier fakes used bold attack descriptions as well. Be sure to run Spell Check, too!
Be very careful about increasing the size of images. Depending on how much you do it, the quality suffers tremendously. It's best to use artwork that is already the size you need or larger. If you absolutely must scale an image up, use the Image Size dialog and choose Bicubic Smoother, scaling it up by 10% increments until you get the size you desire.
I hope this helps!
