Yeah. :) NinjaTheWolf helped out by posing for the cover as one of the spacemen. One of my younger coworkers did the pose for the other. I deliberately used PAPYRUS as the typeface for the title, used a cheap Photoshop "chrome" effect for the lettering, added a generic "leather" border, and -- most important of all -- threw in a gratuitous LENS FLARE. :D I was gratified when someone noticed each of those points on the forum thread.
The obnoxious "WARNING!" label is a reference to Grimtooth's Traps, which used to put an obnoxious "warning!" message on the cover as well. I tried to make the "ELMSTAR GAMES" brand logo look like something that had been originally hand-drawn (so of course, it WAS, complete with stippling), and evocative of the general feel of logos such as the old I.C.E. (Iron Crown Enterprises) logo -- not to mock it per se, but just to evoke a more "old-school" feel.
The big work I put onto this was with the distress and stickers. I printed the mock-up cover, laminated, and then distressed it, putting a lot of care into giving it a fold along the binding point/gutter where it seemed to be in actual softcover books.
I used stickers from some actual former clearance items (from Sci-Fi City) I still had around the house; the choice was deliberate that the ORIGINAL sticker is well up in the corner, to be relatively unobtrustive, while the first clearance sticker obstructs part of the title. The "50 cent" sticker was an actual orange circle sticker I applied and used a marker to write in the final "desperation" clearance price. I scanned it all back in (for the appropriate moire effect that happens when you print something and then scan it back in), then used Photoshop to alter the details of the original store sticker for the fictitious "Ballads of Eldoru" product (taking care to still keep "JPEG scatter" around the letters and numbers).
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2018-04-03 11:07 pm (UTC)The obnoxious "WARNING!" label is a reference to Grimtooth's Traps, which used to put an obnoxious "warning!" message on the cover as well. I tried to make the "ELMSTAR GAMES" brand logo look like something that had been originally hand-drawn (so of course, it WAS, complete with stippling), and evocative of the general feel of logos such as the old I.C.E. (Iron Crown Enterprises) logo -- not to mock it per se, but just to evoke a more "old-school" feel.
The big work I put onto this was with the distress and stickers. I printed the mock-up cover, laminated, and then distressed it, putting a lot of care into giving it a fold along the binding point/gutter where it seemed to be in actual softcover books.
I used stickers from some actual former clearance items (from Sci-Fi City) I still had around the house; the choice was deliberate that the ORIGINAL sticker is well up in the corner, to be relatively unobtrustive, while the first clearance sticker obstructs part of the title. The "50 cent" sticker was an actual orange circle sticker I applied and used a marker to write in the final "desperation" clearance price. I scanned it all back in (for the appropriate moire effect that happens when you print something and then scan it back in), then used Photoshop to alter the details of the original store sticker for the fictitious "Ballads of Eldoru" product (taking care to still keep "JPEG scatter" around the letters and numbers).