On (Re)doing Covers · 7:25am Jun 24th, 2020
Hey, all. Hope you're enjoying the fic.
Some of you might have noticed the cover art is a bit different than usual. Perhaps a bit more... refined, than previous efforts?
The art is still Gabbslines, he's still amazing and he had a ton of fun doing this project.
However, inspired by my dear friend MarvelAndPonder, I decided to try my hand at upping my graphic design game (read: from "0" to "something"), since so much of what she does is fantastic and in a style that appeals to me. seriously look at this stuff it's so pretty and colorful and also simple and clean it's the way it makes me feel tonight
It took the above to convince me to even bother--when it comes to fanfiction philosophies I'm so old-school I'm the m-f'in T-Rex (the cooler, better, featherless one), and for the last decade I'd never been much for Fimfic's cover philosophy, or having pictures embedded in text, or anything; I will screed about how words in a fic should speak entirely for themselves to anyone who will listen.* Also, I find 99% 100% of the designed covers on Fimfic--even the professionally designed ones where you can see the craft on display--to be garish towards my personal tastes.
But meh. Fun is fun, so why not.
The first one I did (the lettering) was for In Your Corner, after much talking to Marvel, and far, far more smashing my head against a wall in anguish.** After doing so, I realized that for my shorter fics, I want to try going with episode title-card-style covers, because I've always loved title cards as an animation fan. For my longer ones, meanwhile, I want to try mocking up EG book covers because it lets me pretend I was writing them all along like I wanted because I find them cute.
Which brings us to my next project over the last few days: redoing Blooming.
For reference, this is the current version. Oh, yeah. Believe me, I know.
Anyway, I kind of... can't decide which version to use. I love them both, I grew up on kids' books with inviting mini-summary copy on the front cover (and the innocence of the summary here is entirely on purpose 
), but the non-text version looks clean and slick. If you want to chime in, be my guest.
~B
*Which is funny because Marvel tells me she was inspired to have more visual aspects in her fics by the fact that I put thematic video embeds as the authors' notes at the end of mine. Oops.)
**Honestly, so far graphic design is proving to be hours of excruciatingly fumbling around in the dark until you find an exact needle in the midst of a dozen haystacks that makes it all make perfect sense. I genuinely don't know how anyone willingly does it. For free, I mean. Actually, even then.
The title card for In Your Corner looks like the title card of an EQG short.
Neat :)
Now, when we getting more story too? ^^’
I will respectfully disagree on the matter of whether feathers make dinosaurs cooler.
You nailed the title card look for In Your Corner. As for Blooming, I'd say it's best to leave out the mini-summary. It clutters the image and I doubt it will look good once shrunken on the story page.
5292419
Agreed on everything but disagreeing about feathers. >:V
And it's hard to let it go
(Full disclosure: I've not played the original game or its remake; I remember the song from either re:coded or 358/2 Days, and don't even remember which of them had it)
I am so damn happy to see you uploading again.
Regarding the Blooming cover, I'm with FoME: the one without the synopsis works better visually.
*Biologist/semi-paleontologist gets onto a soapbox* The thing about theropod feathers is that for the non-avian dinosaurs, they were more like hair or down, not the vaned feathers of modern birds. The standing hypothesis for early feathers was for retaining body heat, so young t-rex were probably covered in fur-like feathers. But, from what we know about the biology of large, endothermic animals (which include things like t-rex), such insulation wouldn't be necessary, since they retain their own body heat much more readily than smaller organisms by virtue of their mass (smaller surface area to volume). So, the current thinking on t-rex feathers is that as juveniles, they had them, but as adults, they lost them, or at least had fewer of them.
5292550
That's actually really cool to learn, thank you for sharing it.
5293810
You're most welcome.
5292550
This also leaves us with baby t-rexes covered in down like baby chickens, and I think we can all agree that that is hilarious and adorable to imagine.