Quote:
Originally Posted by queentess
Yeah, I don't much care for the cover either. Take the rest with a grain of salt, as it's all just my unfiltered opinion:
The red and blue on black isn't pleasing.
The font is... odd. It looks unprofessional, but I don't know why. (I'm not in graphic design, nor do I know my typefaces.)
The black/blue skewed square gives it a diamond-patterning effect, which I just don't like. If the black didn't extend all the way to the edges I think it would look ok.
The wacky psychedelic graphic makes the cover look dated to me. And it reminds me of the unpleasant screen saver from Windows 3.11.
EDIT to add:
The cover also doesn't tell me anything about your book. "Neptune" implies some sort of water or space-related theme, but the cover doesn't give me any feel for the content of the book.
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Hm. Most of what you disliked are things that others especially liked. The blue-on-black, the strange attractor image (produced by a program called chaoscope), even the type.
The font is straight Times New Roman. Maybe what you're responding to is that it doesn't have any of the embellishments that a graphics designer might give it. I'll definitely grant that.
As for conveying the book's content, I went with abstract for the following reasons:
- I liked it.
- The series is The Chaos Chronicles, and I felt that a chaos image would evoke that element.
- I have no budget for commissioning art, and I couldn't find stock art that seemed right.
Another option might have been to use an image of Neptune. That might have worked for this book, but would have left me without a parallel approach for the second and third books.
Those book files aren't ready for upload yet, but here are the covers I've planned:
My focus group all felt that the images reflected the content of the books, but then they had all read the books. So that might be a weakness in my focus group.