What's a good way to design and layout an Apocalypse World playbook?
I'm writing an AW playbook, and I would not like to start from scratch with regards to the layout and such.
[RPG] What’s a good way to design and layout an Apocalypse World playbook?
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I've mostly played the game in forums, so I don't have a lot of experience when it comes to playing the game in real-time.
Like you, I've generally found the fronts a pain. But that isn't to say that there aren't some good stuff to say about them.
First off, they have the threats which are a good inspirational tool, in that they get you (or at least me) to look at things from a different angle. Making a landscape or afflictions an active opponent is something I probably wouldn't consider without the list of threats. And keeping to the list of threats forces me to consider only threats that are active in some way (even adding moves you can make on their part).
And having to create 3 or 4 threats for each front forces you to populate the setting. You can't just have the rival hard-holder and his gang, you need at least two more.
Having an agenda/dark future forces the world steadily towards the precipice, giving the players stuff that they need do something about.
It's all stuff that you don't need the fronts to handle. You could do it without fronts. But then, neither do you really need the MC's agenda, principles or moves. But they are very handy too. I generally find that even when I don't play according to the rules, the rules can still teach me a thing or two.
You said that you did your world-building stuff. I too like world-building. And that might be where fronts fail us. Try this out for an exercise. Make two fronts. Do it using the checklist; select scarcity, make threats related to the scarcity, make dark future, etc. Don't at any point try to force your own characters and places into the front, instead let the characters and places spring from the front.
Feel free to throw the fronts away afterwards. The point of the exercise is not to use the fronts, but that you might learn a thing or two about creating threats (in the the form of warlords, grotesques and the overall front agendas) for the players to interact with, instead of a nice and tidy world for the players to interact with. One provides them challenges and opportunities to grow, the other risks being a mere theme park where the players get to kill people.
Not that I'm saying that you are normally MCing themepark worlds. What I'm saying is that you are unlikely to find a world with more threats (and therefore challenges), than one guided solely by fronts.
According to Mike Mearls, Wizards of the Coast does their design and layout in Adobe InDesign, which is the industry standard for any sort of graphical book publishing. InDesign is a layout program designed primarily for combining graphics and text together.
Microsoft Word, which is a word processing program, is designed primarily for manipulating text, with only minimal options for graphical layout. Pages is also a word processing program; it has a layout mode, but still isn't nearly as powerful as InDesign.
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I laid out the Heralds of Hell playbooks using Scribus, which is a cantankerous piece of software* but does the trick and is free. (Other layout options are described here at RPG.SE in the question "What free software can I use for laying out my own RPG?".) I did them in the original booklet format, not the new tri-fold, so I can only speak to that form factor.
The main body font is Consolas (at 7pt with a 7pt line height), which is a font distributed by Microsoft with one of their versions of Windows (Vista, I think) for a cleaner command line terminal font. Verdana is used for the footer and page numbers, and its bold variant used for constructing the "Rated R" box on the cover page. The largest title font is Vtks good luck for you, which is used just on the cover page for the playbook title and the Apocalypse World word-logo. The main titling font is a combination of Crust Clean and Dirty Ego—since Crust Clean lacks any glyphs for punctuation, Dirty Ego is used where the text needs punctuation in section titles.
Vincent has already written a short but complete-enough tutorial on how to reproduce the Apocalypse World art style. My only amendment to his tutorial is to really, really not sweat the details of the contours: I spent a lot of time zoomed in trying to faithfully replicate each curved contour in the original photo, only to notice later that Vincent's images have a lot of straight edges and shortcuts, and they don't visually suffer for it. There's a thread at Story Games discussing DIY AW Art as well.
The hardest part of the playbook was re-creating the character sheet in the middle. For that I ended up exporting an image from the official playbooks PDF, importing it into Scribus as a faded-out guide, and creating vector elements and text boxes in a layer over top of it. Once I had one version of the sheet I could adapt it as needed for the character archetype. Mostly that meant altering the big box or splitting it in two for stats/countdowns for gear, gangs, or other weird stuff. I used a similar process to approximate the layout for the cover page.
After all that work I pretty much loathed Scribus*, so I wanted something cleaner and easier to work with. I have a mostly-finished ConTeXt template (which is way easier to adapt to new playbooks), but it's stuck using the old XeConTeXt processor due to the fonts and I haven't manage to get a ConTeXt Mk IV version quite working properly. I also have the AW playbook Scribus template available on my site. Anyone is welcome to wrestle with either of those to try to bend them to their will.
* Now it's 2015, and Scribus has much improved in the years since. It was not maddening at all when I used it recently to create a graphical handout.