A custom face set is the best value in custom dice and the easiest thing to get wrong. The die is read at speed, at an angle, from a couple of feet away, usually by someone mid-conversation.

Everything below follows from that.

Silhouette does the work, not detail

At 16mm a face is smaller than a fingernail. What survives is the outline — whether the shape is round, angular, tall or wide. Interior detail turns to texture.

Design your icons as solid silhouettes first and only add detail if it survives being printed at actual size. We render every face set at true size for exactly this reason.

Six faces need six distinct shapes

The most common failure is an icon set where three faces are all roughly circular. Players then have to read rather than recognise, which slows the game and makes the dice feel unpleasant to use.

Lay all six out in a row in silhouette and squint. If any two read the same, redraw one.

Keep one face conventional if you can

Replacing every face makes a die unreadable to anyone who has not learned the set. Retaining one recognisable anchor — a blank, a single pip, a number — gives new players something to orient from.

This matters most for dice sold at retail, where somebody picks the set up with no rulebook in front of them.

Weight the set deliberately

A custom face set is also a probability distribution. Two identical faces mean that outcome is twice as likely, which is a design tool and a trap in equal measure.

Write out the intended distribution before you design the icons, not after. We have seen more than one game rebalanced late because the dice were drawn before the maths was settled.

Colour is a second channel, and a weak one

Colour fill can reinforce a face set but should never be the only difference between two faces. Roughly one man in twelve has some form of colour vision deficiency, and dice are often used in poor light.

Use colour to group or emphasise. Use shape to distinguish.

The d20 twenty face

On polyhedral sets, the twenty face is the branding slot everyone wants. It is also the face players most need to identify instantly, often across a table and upside down.

A simple mark works. A detailed logo does not, and it produces genuine friction at the table. We will show it at actual size and tell you honestly which one yours is.

What to send us

Vector icons if you have them, or descriptions if you do not — our design team draws face sets routinely. Include the intended distribution, and tell us what the dice ship alongside so the visual language matches.