[rogue_ronin]

Darn it! I had a nice answer for you, but lost it...

Let me try to re-create it.

The figure art and planet images were all found on the web. I cleaned them up, pulled them from their backgrounds where necessary (#6 had a horrible, horrible background), added color, removed color, added gold-leaf to some (hard!) and just generally made the figures fit the theme (which grew from the first cover.)

I got better with The Gimp as I went, but I think the third cover is the best. The last three might be a little formulaic. I did all the buttons myself, but got an outline or two from more found art (like the points of the arrows.) I did nearly all the color, definitely all the fonts, layout and layering.

The internal structure and layout grew out of trying to understand CSS and make a generally useful set of XHTML tools to structure and edit eBook sources. Plus, I like to think a bit about how it should work. Most eBooks are ugly, and not fun to play with. And I think that the source is pretty readable, which is important.

I don't think I have any moral claim to control this -- I hunted for and assembled a lot of stuff, and added the value of my hard work, a logical structure and my sense of aesthetics and function. But the beauty of the things (if it's there) is in large part due to inspiration from the great work of the artists (including ERB!) Just trying to properly respect them by doing it as right as I can.

So, go forth and convert! Add more value!

m a r

ps: I think that the use of fonts could use some tweaking, so any suggestions will be listened to. If you fix anything, let me know so I can fix it here.