Brig of War, First Effort

by wjw on July 25, 2012

Here’s my first try at a cover for Brig of War (formerly The Raider). Let me know what you think.

Karen Lofstrom July 25, 2012 at 7:05 am: Do like the painting of the ship. Don’t like the shadow effect on the type. Nor am I fond of green and orange color schemes. However, these may just be my idiosyncratic tastes. My tastes are pronounced.
Clyde July 25, 2012 at 8:16 am: Looks great to me.
Gary Gibson July 25, 2012 at 9:49 am: In general I really like it, but do agree with Karen about the colours and shadowing/3D effect behind the letters: it’s too much. Take out the shadows and it’ll look much more crisp. And I really think you should change the orange to something much more neutral, preferably white, otherwise it might be a touch blinding.

A thought – I think it might be worth seeing how it looks with the ‘BRIG of WAR’ part larger than it currently is – in fact, just about as wide as the ‘WILLIAMS’ above it. It’s good if the upper part of a book cover’s text is reflected in the text at the bottom, in colour or typeface or, in this case, size.
Sean Craven July 25, 2012 at 11:23 am: I’m in agreement with ‘painting good, work on title.’ The font seems more mid/late twentieth century than age-of-sail, and the cast-metal look of the embossing effect emphasized the distance from wood. I’d nose around for something a little more Olde looking. Rather than set it off from the background painting with color and modeling, one possible solution might be setting it in solid black, then putting a layer under the type layer. On that layer, use the ellipse tool to set a white ellipse behind the type so as to make it clearly visible. Then use the Gaussian Blur filter to diffuse the edges of the white ellipse so it fades into the background. Then use the opacity control to increase the transparency of the layer the white ellipse is on until you’ve achieved a pleasing balance between easily reading the title and being able to make out a bit of the painting behind it. Just a thought to give you something to wrestle with.
John Appel July 25, 2012 at 11:51 am: I’m generally in agreement with the others. For the color of the titles, though, have you thought about reprising one of the tropes from the era the novel originally dates from, and doing the title of each book in the series in a different color, say, red for the first, white for the second, blue for the third, and perhaps black for the fourth? Of course, the full effect is lost when you don’t have the books lined up on the shelf next to each other, but it might still work if they’re in a line on the B&N / Amazon search page.
Not Todd July 25, 2012 at 9:00 pm: The orange mirrors the flames from the guns. I like the overall affect.
Ralf The Dog. July 25, 2012 at 10:44 pm: The ships sails look a bit damaged and the ship looks very old. Perhaps, you could clean it up a bit first? Make it look less like an old battle worn ship out of the 1,700s? People might think it is a Revolutionary war, Navy book.
Clyde July 26, 2012 at 2:31 am: There needs to be something to frame the entire image. Perhaps a subdued background color or texture would do it.
Clyde July 26, 2012 at 2:36 am: By “entire image”, I meant “entire cover”. (Sorry to be unclear.)
DensityDuck July 26, 2012 at 5:27 am: I still say people are going to think the book is about the ship’s prison.
Brian Renninger July 26, 2012 at 5:42 am: I like the painting and the orange title colors. But, it needs a more 18th century or early 19th century font. And, to back up Clyde some sort of framing device like a shaded oval.

For fonts perhaps something akin to the font in these graphics:

http://www.p22.com/products/franklin.html

–Brian R.