ajillustrates ajillustrates
30 Jan 2023, 04:25

@kirsten-mcg I love this illustration! The rendering style, color palette, and Reepicheep's design are amazing. It's a great portfolio piece, but I want to make sure that the graphic design additions that make this a book cover design don't hold it back. I'm a Creative Director for my day job, and I've been thinking about your text layout. I think there are some easy fixes you can impliment to take this to the next level, and I hope that you don't mind a quick draw over with some suggestions.

kristen-mcg_dawn-treader_edit.jpg

  1. As @Kristen-Lango pointed out, the text on the illustration, especially the small fonts, are hard to read, so I put some color overlays under them to create separation.
  2. I generally stear clear of black as the color for title treatments (especially if it doesn't exist in the artwork/background/etc.), so I changed "C.S. Lewis" to the same brown as your darkest wood, and "The Chronicles of Narnia" to white, since that's going to stand out on the warm browns of the boat much better than having a dark color. Your sky's colors are so warm and beautiful that I could see two solutions for the title of the book, so I've shown one option with the same purple from the sea and one option in white, but with an additional purple drop shadow added to both lift it off and separate it from the sky and tie it into the composition.
  3. As for fonts, it's usually a pretty good rule of thumb to stick to 2 different fonts/font styles, especially for a layout with this small amount of text. I prefer the character of the font that you used for "Dawn Treader," but since I couldn't quickly place it from memory, I used Georgia Regular and Georgia Bold Italic in these examples. And yes, I technically added a third font style with Georgia Italic to "of the," but what are rules if not to be bent for a better result? 😉
  4. And finally, always double check that everything's aligned correctly. "Dawn Treader" drifted off-center to the left.

Again, I absolutely love this illustration! As a kid, I couldn't have waited to open the book with this cover on it to see what it's all about. It's such a killer piece.