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Hey aliengeometries, this is BáiYù of tofurocks here.

This rule is meant to encourage creators to customize their works to make it more appealing to potential customers. We've unfortunately both seen and received many comments on sites such as Reddit about how large scale bundles (both charity and mutual aid) on itchio are "full of shovelware," which we highly disagree with on principle alone. Our aim with this rule is to hopefully discourage such misconceptions because we know our participants put a lot of care and love into their projects.
Customization does not necessarily have to be super extensive, especially since we know not everyone is a graphic designer. A change in font can do a lot to increase the polish of non-book PDFs, and embellishments such as borders can elevate the presentation. The following resources are fantasy-flavored so I'm not sure if it'll necessarily fit your projects, but I hope they provide some inspiration!
1. https://kenney-assets.itch.io/fantasy-ui-borders
2. https://ko-fi.com/alderdoodle/shop
If you worry that the font that you choose may not be dyslexic-friendly, you can still offer a version of your project with an easy-to-read typeface for accessibility purposes.

Not to be autistic and overly literal, but I think I need more clarification or examples here of what "customization" means to you. I guess my actual zine has body text in Georgia, but I can't add borders without compromising my design, both aesthetically and in the technical sense that it's optimized for home print, so I would have to add the borders to the active printing area and therefore resize or remove images and significantly rearrange the text to accommodate them. Do images count? Does visibly intentional text formatting, such as footnotes, count?

The Power of Pride Bundle21 days ago

Images and formatting counts! We're ultimately looking for anything that shows time and care went into the document, so it sounds like you're good in that regard.

aliengeometries21 days ago

Cool, thanks!

Snow Lupinwood12 days ago

Asking as the project I submitted may look like this at first glance, I formatted useing google docs and then added images at the end. Is that considered customized enough? (I also offer an epub version so my question may be moot.)

The Power of Pride Bundle12 days ago

As this is a collection of short stories, it would fall under our Books/Novels rule, which does not require individual pages of the work to be customized to a high degree.

By the way, we wanted to note that the name of the pdf has a (2) in the file, so it's "Life's a Zoo (2).pdf" rather than "Life's a Zoo.pdf", which seems unintentional just in case you wanted to fix that!

Snow Lupinwood11 days ago

It was an issue with how it saved to my computer (I have a first file that is set up for when I print the physical copies). If you all want I can adjust it, though it will have to wait until tomorrow.

itch.io

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