The author says:
Following the advice of some commenters (thank you to all who the took the time, it really helped!) I went back to the drawing board and redid both covers for my series. I think the backgrounds work, but I’m having some trouble with the text and how to set it off a bit more. Maybe a color overlay on the text? Maybe I don’t need to? I’m trying to keep things a bit more simple but I may have gone too far. I am also unsure on the font itself. A more bold, less disintegrating font, may be better and simpler.
Genre: Cyberpunk, Sci-fi.
Elevator pitch: In the second novella, a night of playing a VRMMORPG turns dark when one of Ragan’s friends doesn’t wake up after being captured by a raid boss. Using her skills as computer security cracker she will have to figure out what is trapping people in the game, and for what reason before time runs out.
First cover redone: https://imgur.com/a/Onqw2mI
[original submission and comments here]
Nathan says:
It’s definitely a much bolder concept for a cover. With some tweaks, I think it’ll be perfect.
I think the main problem with the title font isn’t so much the distress, it’s the proportion. With a long word like “FUNCTION” displayed vertically, it ends up being confined to the far left (in contrast to the redone first cover, where the vertical “DATA” dominates nicely). I would try stretching the font horizontally by maybe 20%, and see if that gives it the visual weight you need.
As far as making the title pop from the background, I think the solution is simple: darken the background and use pure white for the type instead of off-white.
Other comments?
That art is fantastic, and it fits the description perfectly! My tweak would be to darken it and kick up the contrast a little. I want those black areas to be actually black or near-black, which will help your title pop. Also, I’d switch to a sans serif font, which would look more sci-fi/thriller and would also make the font bolder and easier to read.
I was a bit worried that darkening it would lose the pop the art had, but I didn’t play much with the contrast, which I should have. Adding that to the list of things to play with.
That’s how I was leaning. I like the font, but it feels too… broken, I guess. It doesn’t dominate like I need it to because the profile of the text isn’t solid.
Yes, you don’t want the bright parts to look dim and gray. Generally I find that for every two steps you decrease the brightness, you should increase the contrast one step.
Alternately, you can edit the color curves to darken the dark colors while leaving the light colors the same, or use a layer mask to only darken parts of the image.
I love the art, too.
But…there is never a good reason to make the title of a book difficult to read. That is the last thing you ever want to do. Making the type textured was bad enough, but making half of the title vertical is just making bad worse.
You need to make the title work better with the art. I half suspect you handled the title the way you did to avoid covering up any more than the art than you could avoid. Don’t do that. The title is more important. As I said, make the title work with and within the artwork, not as a frame for it.
And that was what I was thinking to, the text was too hard to read and I was stuck on how to really resolve that. I didn’t do it that way to avoid covering the artwork, more I was trying to make the text as big as I could while not breaking the words. Since they’re long I got concerned that it would be two small if I did it across. I did Datatrigger first and I liked the way it turned out so was also trying to follow the theme.
I think changing the font will help quiet a bit. What do you suggest about the text? Should I go back to how I had it before, title top, byline below and just make it as large I can that way?
I had a bunch of advice until I found this
http://a.co/hzeXJma
Meh, I’m not to worried about it, it’s a stock image I got some changes I’m thinking about doing to the picture itself. I’d still like to hear you advice if you have the time.
More contrast in whatever image you choose.
Brighter text color.
Title at the top. Don;t be afraid to adjust the scale of each word so they match width.
Byline at the bottom and much larger.
Covers need to be legible as thumbnails AND in monochrome.
Would the ‘Hacked’ font work for this series? It’s distorted but in a very clean way.
https://i.imgur.com/0unSwIK.jpg
B.L.’s redo is a great improvement.
A cover should not be a puzzle for the potential reader to work out. It needs to be absolutely clear and immediate since it may get only the briefest of glances. This immediacy is especially important when the cover is only a thumbnail.
Still, B.L. brings up a very valid point about stock art: it can appear on dozens of other books at the same time…and most likely books in the same genre your book is in. This is something you should take under serious consideration unless the changes you plan on making to the art are radical.
The interconnecting cross of the two words of the title works much better on the redone cover for the first book than it does on this one. I think it comes down to word length. On the first book cover you have the freedom to make the word ‘Data’ much larger than ‘Trigger’, which causes the eye to naturally read the larger word first and causes no confusion over word order with the changing text direction. It operates like a very small word-cloud.
Generally I am not keen on cross-style titles, but I think this works extremely well with ‘Data Trigger’ and can adequately for this one if you can come up with a shorter word to use in place of ‘Function’. In this case I think it may be worth the attempt, at least as an experiment.
Shorter computer related words I found containing the letter ‘O’ include: ‘Boot’, ‘Root’, ‘Host’, ‘Node’, ‘Macro’, and ‘Logic’. Of these, ‘Logic Overload’ seems to make the most sense, but the ‘O’ is in the wrong place for the existing geometry. You could move ‘Overload’ to a position between the screens and the glyph to correct for this. ‘Macro Overload’ would fit the existing placement very well, but the only BS reasons I can think of for why the phrase could make sense are a good deal more tenuous than those for ‘Logic Overload’ (which are themselves somewhat weak). The rest of the word combinations seem a bit too technobabble to me. I would worry over using them.
Unlike the others, I had no problem with the words cross connected. The reading order seemed very obvious since Function starts in the upper left corner, dictating that it is read first. Changing and brightening the font is a very good idea, along with adjusting the contrast. Adding a black drop shadow for the title, name and tag line would also help the the writing pop from the background. The artwork does match your story description as well as the title. Overall, I really like it.
I also didn’t have any trouble with the crossed words. If there was any readability issue it was just the font/lack of contrast. It’s distinctive and I certainly wouldn’t say plopping the title down horizontally is an improvement.
I also don’t mind the interconnected title, but the image layout and other books in the series must be considered if he wants them to follow the same format.
A valid point, but the author redid his first cover so both use the cross-connected words so both titles work in unison.
The first cover demonstrates why this idea is tricky. To make it fit the cover he had to drastically alter the scale of the two words, beyond what I believe is acceptable. It also limits the creativity of future titles by causing him to consider how they will fit this format.
The artwork for the new covers is fantastic, as are the other examples of that artist’s work. Since a lone figure is common to many of the pieces, I’d stick with that for this book series, also. Something else to tell potential readers there is more to the story.
The first cover makes the greatest case for the cross-connection. It works very, very well on that one. This one works fine as-is (barring tweaks) when viewed in sequence with the first cover, but considered on its own it is harder for my eye to figure out where to start reading. I think at least getting ‘Function’ into at least a somewhat larger sized type would be beneficial. I agree that it is better than the standard horizontal run, though I would generally count this series as an exception on that point.
I wasn’t going to argue this matter…but I must.
Perhaps the criss-crossed title can be read after a moment’s hesitation…but that moment may be all it takes for the potential reader’s eye to move on to the next book.
And it also has to be asked: what does this little bit of typographic trickery add to the potential reader’s appreciation of what this book is about? Does it suggest anything about what the book is about, or what its themes or nature may be? If not, then what, exactly is the point?
I understand that the author did something similar with an earlier book–but that doesn’t change the argument. What was bad for one is going to be bad for the other. And while I appreciate the necessities of branding…you also don’t want a brand that works against you. I would re-do both books rather than make the second suffer from the faults of the first.
I don’t see any reason to change any of my earlier comments.
I don’t think that the handling of the title works at all.
Since there appears to be no inclination to work on that problem, the only thing left is try to make the vertical word as legible as possible. Working against this is its position, crowded against the left edge, its lack of contrast against the background and the general busyness of the background combined with a typeface that itself is too busy.
The first problem I guess you are stuck with.
The rest you might be able to fix by doing two things. One is to make the type white while at the same time increasing the density of the darks in the art. This would not make the area directly behind the title any less distractingly busy, however, so you might want to consider adding a vignetted spotlight effect, making the central part of the art bright and colorful but the edges—and the background directly behind the type—darker and less saturated overall. This would give a visual focus to the cover as well as provide more contrast to the title.