Creating countersheets

Sadly I have never come across a template for countersheets.

I think most people will use a standard layout program (freehand, illustrator, quark) to create their own. By doing this they can achieve a higher quality prototype.

A quick and ugly way, which I am unhappy with myself for suggesting this to you, would be to create an excel spreadsheet with a grid that matches your desired counter size (say 1" squares). Then you can import images into each square as the background. And then set formatting of the text to the lower left corner (or whatever corner you desire to place the values).

Here is a quick ugly excel file I tossed together.

http://www.bgdf.com/files/My_Uploads/Zzzzz/CounterSheetTemplate.xls

All you have to do is replace each image and values, background colors of each cell, and you will have a approx 1" square counter sheet.

It looks something like this right now:

Obviously the more time you take with creating your images the better you can make this look. But I am at work so I dont have much available for images!

I use Word tables, nto Excel. It turns out you can copy rows and blocks of cells in Word as well, but the layout features of Word exceed Excel by far.

I then print on thick glossy paper and use 1mm vinyl floor tile for mounting. Floor tile has sticky backing; the result is nice and heavy.

The regular 2mm is too thick and hard to cut, but 1mm tile works great! It may be hard to find but our neighborhood store (Lowe's) has it. It is easily cut with a guillotine paper cutter or even with regular scissors. In addition, the brand that I use (Novalis; http://www.novalis-intl.com/HF_Styles.htm#) does not have that annoying smell that most floor tiles have. And it's much cheaper than the thick 2mm tile! I really recommend it to everybody, you can do tons of things with it, it's a great prototyping material!

nand,

Glad you pointed that out! I have not had a chance to use your software yet so I did not even think about that option!