Back in the day, I had an REB1100 -- so I used to make 2-color (black and white) PNGs for covers, at 314x480 pixels. Individually, they're very small, most well under 5kb. None break 10kb. I think the "artificial" restrictions to color and size sometimes led to actual creativity. Not always though.
I made a complete collection of covers for all of Heinlein's 56 short stories. I used clipart and images from the web. Some are junk, some are good. Love to hear what people think. (I know -- short stories don't usually need covers, but it was something to do and if you want to read just one short, well, it makes opening it up pleasant.)
This is actually a collection of images made over the course of a few years, done roughly in alphabetical order. I got the list from Nitrosyncretic.com, so it includes non-SciFi shorts as well. I used a font called Heinlein.ttf, that looks to be imitative of the mid-80s font on the old Ballantine (?) covers. Some of these were done so long ago, I think I used Paint Shop Pro: I haven't used Windows in a
long time...
Nowadays, I'm doing color covers, at 600x800. I just did the first twenty Nero Wolfe covers -- but as a template, no individual images -- changing colors and navigation icons (XHTML) every ten books. I also did a nice set of color covers for the
Barsoom collection I uploaded here on MobileRead.
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