design competition round one results Options

[brooklyneast05]

ROUND TWO WILL BE ANNOUNCE SOON, IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS SOMETIME




alright, thanks to the three who submitted this round. hopefully more people will be out of school and less busy next round. moving on, these are in order, winner, runner-up, everyone else.


Mike:

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yours was the judge's favorite. we thought the design went great with the book. to be honest we really didn't have much negative to say about it. we like it better than the cover that's actually on this book. you did a good job on the image and i'm impressed with the process you went through to make the graphic. i especially like the font choice for the title on the cover. the whole thing looks great, good job.

since you're the winner, you gain 10 points for this round.


Abbey:

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yours was a close second. over all, the judges liked it. your cover had positives and negatives. over all i think that it's a good image choice in fitting with the theme of the book (i assume, i'm just basing it off the description of the book). we did wish you'd done more to the image. i mean it fits as it is, which is probably why you left it alone for the most part as far as editing from the original but it's kinda hard to be judged against mike when he went through more of a process to get his cover image. it can go both ways. we also thought the spine text might be a little hard to read. if it was on a shelf, i'm not sure it would jump out at me if i was only seeing the spine.

we really liked the back cover though. you had a lot of little details over all that we really liked and made it feel put together. we think you matched the cold "dead" feel really well. i think this also looks better than the original cover. i'd way rather pick this book up than the original cover: here

since you're runner up, you gain 5 points for this round.


Joseph:

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you came in third. i think this was a good choice of book to do because you have so many possibilities, and also because their covers typically suck in my opinion, but we didn't feel you executed it as well as you could have. i wasn't there when the judges talked about yours so i'm gonna give you their complaints first and i'll give you some other ideas from me in a second. they didn't like the text, especially the glow, which i agree with completely. it's mainly the back cover that killed you, they thought the front cover looked alright. the back cover is just too much text crammed in there in a not very attractive way. they didn't like all the drop shadows either because it made it feel blurry. i pretty much agree with that.

alright, so, if you cover up the back cover with your hand and just look at the spine and front cover....it looks SO much better. as is, the front cover is not the best, but it's not bad either. i think if you had made "guinness" in that brighter red that's on the front, it would have looked better. those two reds don't go well for me as it is. it also would have made the title pop more, which i think you need because i think "2009" is the dominant part you look at first, but that's not really as important as the title itself. so make the "guinness" the brighter red, "world" the brighter blue, and "records" black and i think it probably would have worked better as well as feeling more complete since you'd be pulling colors from your image. the more colors you have the harder it gets to make it feel like one piece. i would have probably made the text at the bottom black, or any color besides that same background color with a drop shadow glowy thing. it looks blurry and easily looked over. the back just suffers more than anything from poor arrangement. i'm not a fan of the font or text color, but if it was arranged better it would help a ton. stuff is crammed looking like the other judges said, it just looks thrown on there. i know you're getting a long critique but i think you need all this so you can get better, let's look at the back cover

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messing with typography issues has so much to do with detail. there's quite a few things that bother me about this, but in blue are examples of basic alignment issues that make it look lazy. with all the blue circles, those are places where i wish you had just lined up the right edges of the letters. they're almost lined up but then not really, so it looks not as clean. the red circle, where those words are is just not attractive. it's really odd placement and feels clumped in together. the easiest thing that would have made this all look better in my opinion, is to make the font smaller. then BAM you'd have way more room to mess around with stuff and it wouldn't feel like you're just trying to make the words fit instead of trying to make the words look good. it's too crammed in with not enough space between the headlines, not enough space anywhere really.

i don't know what this font is, but i don't like it. it looks either like it's a badly put together font, or you altered the spacing somehow. if you look at the green underlined part, it bothers me. like why is the spacing so odd looking here? the E and A have practically no space between them, but there is huge spaces between the B,R, and E before that as well as between the entire word WORLD. if you altered the spacing between letters yourself then that's one thing. if you didn't then i just dislike this font because it's given you weird spacing everywhere that makes it feel more sloppy and scrunched together to me. this is a lot more noticeable with a blocky font like this. let me know what font you used and if you messed with the spacing between letters.

mostly it was just details that hurt you. color choices, font choices, drop shadows. the guinness book of world records seems to be obsessed with shiny foil looking covers for about 10 years now so i'm glad you didn't do that kind of look. i think you had a good idea and more than anything the heavy brown cluttered text drowned your good stuff out.


because of how we've set the scoring up, every round the winner gets 10 points, runner up gets 5 and everyone else not in the top two gets zero. since there's only 3 in this round, that leaves only you getting zero, typically it wouldn't just be you though. i'm worn out now from that, you can't say i didn't try to help you son.
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i'll make a thread that will be pinned that we'll put the winner and runner up in each round as we go along.

[Harp]

can't see mike's.

[brooklyneast05]

no clue why some can see it and some can't. can you now?

[Harp]

nope.

[none345678]

Damn, Mike's cover should be the actual cover of To Kill a Mocking Bird.

[Mikeplyts]

no clue why some can see it and some can't. can you now?

I know, wierd... I could go look in a PM Nat sent me that had a working image, that is, if you'd like.

Damn, Mike's cover should be the actual cover of To Kill a Mocking Bird.

This.


Congratulations Mike, and yours was really good too Abbey.

[brooklyneast05]

i probably should have closed this thread because this thread isn't just for round one, it's going to have every round we do.

comments should probably have gone here in regards to this specific round:
http://www.createblog.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=231575

but i duno what to do about that now though

[brooklyneast05]

oh yeah, i forgot about that. yeah i'd rather do that and keep this one closed, and discussion in the other.

[Simba]

gat dayum JC, dead on critique on the typography

and awesome job Mike, I approve

[Maccabee]

The spine on the second one is backwards.

Mike and abbey, what font did you use? Specificially on the front and back cover.

[none345678]

I love the Thirteen Reasons Why Cover you did Abbey. I like the design, and that's my favorite book ever, ha.

Mike, your cover is really good. That should be the cover for the book.

I realllly want to read it! I am just to lazy to see if my school has it lol

The spine on the second one is backwards.

Mike and abbey, what font did you use? Specificially on the front and back cover.

front: hammerkeys
back: courier new

[livwho]

Dammit, I should've joined when I had the chance. Would've done "Of Mice and Men" or "The Shawkshank Redemption".

[Mikeplyts]

^Yup.