New Novel coming, what do you think of the cover?

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dkersten:
I'm not offended by the feedback at all, it's why I posted this. I like hearing other's opinions, especially the critical ones. Some of it might influence my decisions, some won't at all.

The font isn't Times, it's Trajan Pro. It's a roman font that's a bit more stylish than TNR, and I liked the small caps (without having to apply a small caps text effect). Like I said earlier, I was shooting for uniformity between the two books. I'm not opposed to changing it, for the title only, but it would have to fit the subtitle and not be too bold. The word IMMORTAL contains two m's, the widest letter in the alphabet, and the others are all wide letters too, so a lot of fonts end up either squished together or too short. The last thing I want here is to end up with a title font that has a totally different scale than my first book. Plus, anything too bold ends up looking horrible when considering the thumbnail that Amazon uses for advertising. This font comes across pretty well in those ads, and those ads sell my books, so it's an important consideration. If I could find a better font that looks as good or better when shrunk down to a thumbnail, I would consider it. I will look because I always consider feedback and want to improve this as much as I can. I'm not a huge fan of sans serif type fonts because they are kind of boring to me. Helvetica or Arial is just too generic looking, IMHO. I kind of like Papyrus in a small cap form for this one though.. the ragged edges of the font kind of say "aged" and that fits the word nicely. Kind of generic but not horrible and it seems to scale well with the rest of the cover.

IMHO, Most of the time when I see 2 or 3 different fonts on a cover page my first thought is the artist is an amateur trying to jazz up a boring cover with different bottled fonts. If done right, it can make a major difference, if done poorly it ends up looking like a 6 year old discovered the fonts menu. Nothing sets a cover apart like a mix of fonts that looks like the author's grandkid showed them how to do it in MS Paint.

The glows, as I said before, come out around 50% less on the printed paperback. No need to dull them down for that. The screen version will get toned down, at least in the title. With the larger letters of this title, the glow is too much and I never changed it, just left the layer style from The Freezer. The glow on the strand works well to grab attention, especially on smaller representations (like the "similar products" and the smaller thumbnail ads on Amazon). More colors or less contrast would only jumble up the image and make it blend with the other covers I compete against. Again, my opinion, but that's a big consideration for me.

dkersten:

--- Quote from: Howard_Casto on November 20, 2015, 03:34:53 pm ---I agree with the reds as well, but I figured one suggestion at a time. The DNA helix is kind of hard to make out because the background is red and it's a pinkish hue. I don't know what source image you are using, but if you could put some color in the helix, preferably a contrasting color like green, it would really pop.

--- End quote ---
I played with other colors, and nothing seems to contrast well against dark red without looking gaudy. I added some blue to the glow to give it a brighter pop, but greens just make it look like a virus (biohazard, lol) against the red, and blue just looks gaudy.. oranges and yellows make it look drab.

The image I used is actually a brush and I formed it using Illustrator initially then warped it a little in PS. It is grayscale and initially was very opaque, so I dropped it on a black background, cut it out, then created a repeating pattern and placed it in Illustrator, then applied it to my path as a brush there, then moved it back to PS. From there I applied some various colorizations after hand painting a darker mask over the helix strands to define it better. Any color I apply will come out a little washed out.

I played a bit with some of the things mentioned here and here is where it is at with those changes.. the font to the Papyrus font for the title, and some adjustments to the glows and color tweaks to the strand. I would do more but I am heading home and don't have Adobe CC installed there, so I will have to come in over the holiday to finalize it. Publishing really soon now, and need to focus on the final editing. So much to do, lol.

Vigo:
Please Please Please DON'T use papyrus!! It is a standard shelf font in MS and highly recognizable as being the same font used by every spa/yoga joint for all their local flyers. Like Comic Sans, you can't unsee Papyrus the minute you use it once. Head to Dafont.com and find a 100% free font that you dont see every day. :cheers:

dkersten:

--- Quote from: Vigo on November 20, 2015, 06:45:53 pm ---Please Please Please DON'T use papyrus!! It is a standard shelf font in MS and highly recognizable as being the same font used by every spa/yoga joint for all their local flyers. Like Comic Sans, you can't unsee Papyrus the minute you use it once. Head to Dafont.com and find a 100% free font that you dont see every day. :cheers:

--- End quote ---
lol that was my hesitation, but aside from the overuse, it actually fits nicely.

Howard_Casto:
There is a trap with using a highly recognizable font associated with something else though.

I was watching Into the Badlands last week and all through the show's ads something just looked off and it was distracting me. It turns out they were using a font for their text extremely similar to the one used on Knight Rider. So I guess I was subconsciously waiting for a car with a snarky attitude to roll onto the screen.

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