Monday, March 19, 2012

A picture worth a thousand words

As an artist and a designer, I like to make my own covers.  I've made DVD covers, I've made posters, and I designed the cover for "Show Me the End of the World." That one came to me fairly easily... I recall my thought process being simply that I wanted an image of the world on fire and the text to have a fairly simple treatment and this is what came out:

Pretty solid, eh?  I mean, I dig it.

Now I'm designing the cover for my short story "The Box" and I'm running into a little bit of a snag.  Initially, I came up with this:

But honestly the more I look at it the more I think it just looks kinda cheesy and dumb.  In my opinion, the cover for "Show Me the End of the World" looks somewhat classier, and I think that's mostly because of my type choices.  I had a couple ideas for "The Box" where the type woud be box-shaped in some fashion to play off on that whole idea.

But then I started thinking more along the lines of the concepts at work in the story and about taking things a bit less literally with the cover.

This one has its own obvious problems.

I like the treatment of the text on this one, but otherwise it seems far too plain.  There obviously needs to be something else of a graphical nature on this version, but I'm a loss as to what.  I thought perhaps some kind of blood spatter, but where should it go and how should it interact with the type?  It's a conundrum alright.

Current Soundtrack
"Superman Returns" by John Ottman

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