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Hall of Champions advice request


JmOz

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On a phone at work, but a couple of quick things:

 

Find a large (high-Rez: high DPI, whatever you want to call it) flag, waving if you can, and make a full sky out of it.  Find a public domain image if you can.  If not, run to the hardware store, have someone flop about one of their surplus Memorial Day impulse buy flags.  Save it in the highest res you can. 

 

I like to work in 1200 to 2400 DPI, but never work in less than 600.  Less than six hundred, it looks like butt if you try to print it. 

When you drop something onto your pre-sized background, do not enlarge it to make it what you want unless you are working with vector graphics.  Start big and go small.  Do not use or save in jpg.  Vector is best; png is a distant Second. 

 

I'd love to show you some of what you could do, but as I stated elsewhere, my graphics box died near the end of Western HERO, necessitating the hiring of a pro to finish a few things for me. 

 

I have yet to find the budget to replace it (or the desire, since Adobe has done to a subscription format.) 

 

Biggest thing: no white space 

 

Consider a skyline with a semi-transparent overlay of the flag as the sky. 

 

Conside the title skewed to follow the stripes on the flag. 

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VERY ROUGH COVER.pdf

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

On a phone at work, but a couple of quick things:

 

Find a large (high-Rez: high DPI, whatever you want to call it) flag, waving if you can, and make a full sky out of it.  Find a public domain image if you can.  If not, run to the hardware store, have someone flop about one of their surplus Memorial Day impulse buy flags.  Save it in the highest res you can. 

 

I like to work in 1200 to 2400 DPI, but never work in less than 600.  Less than six hundred, it looks like butt if you try to print it. 

When you drop something onto your pre-sized background, do not enlarge it to make it what you want unless you are working with vector graphics.  Start big and go small.  Do not use or save in jpg.  Vector is best; png is a distant Second. 

 

I'd love to show you some of what you could do, but as I stated elsewhere, my graphics box died near the end of Western HERO, necessitating the hiring of a pro to finish a few things for me. 

 

I have yet to find the budget to replace it (or the desire, since Adobe has done to a subscription format.) 

 

Biggest thing: no white space 

 

Consider a skyline with a semi-transparent overlay of the flag as the sky. 

 

Conside the title skewed to follow the stripes on the flag. 

On a shoe string budget for this :)  But how does this look?

 

 

VERY ROUGH COVER.pdf

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That's great!

 

See---

 

Now I've admitted before and do so again that I am _not_ an artist or a graphic designer or anything along those lines.  Most of what I know is self-taught, with _loads_ of help from _very_ wonderful, very accommodating people with actual expertise.  And brother, I _need_ the help!  I can write.

 

Period.

 

 

I like the comic-book looking corner brand you've got going on there; it works well for the theme.  I won't comment on the white lines from some layer issues because, as you noted, it's a "very rough" draft.

 

Anyway, one of the things that _everyone_ who helped me learned absolutely beat into me was that white space = death of interest.  Never have white space.

 

Go as fancy or as simple as you want, but never white space.

 

 

All artistic elements should either be working together-- that is, creating a single theme / image / story, or clearly divided into separate parts (I think the Champions Now cover is a great example of that, with the central character serving a nice subtle divider between the four different stories going on.  If you have elements that don't work together, get rid of them  (that's one of the hardest parts for me, actually, because I have _zero_ visual arts talent :( ).

 

That being said, think about a different font-- I like the colors, as they pull from the flag in the background, but think about a font that evokes "flag-related" imagery: military stencil?  (not my thing, but I can see it working) something akin to the title of the Declaration of Independence-- it doesn't matter, so long as it works with the theme.

 

Same with your characters:  they look great, but perhaps select two that are more "in-uniform" looking, or more "patriot" or "agent" themed.  Don't ditch the characters-- don't even change their look, if you like them the way they are; consider swapping them for characters that "look" more like what you're selling:  a book of agents / agencies.

 

Going back to white space:

 

take the text in that white block and

 

1) clean it up better or completely re-type it, _absolutely verbatim_, as I assume it's mandatory legalese.  Either way, even in PDF, that jpg "crawl" that's been cropped around it shows on the screen, and it will look positively _nasty_ in print.

 

2) Consider (or at least ask about) re-arranging it more spread-out full width so as to assign it less vertical space on the cover

 

3) void the white space.  Even if you have to retype the boilerplate from scratch, let there be nothing but the text and the image it's laid on top of.

 

I went and looked before finishing typing this, and the ones I used aren't around anymore (they don't seem to last long), but--  and I swear, it took me _forever_ to figure out why this was, and when it hit me, I threw up just a little bit in my mouth, but still, they are _extremely_ good at this....

 

Wait, let me back up a bit--

 

The images that HERO Games provides / mandates look like crap.  I don't mean that to insult them; I did a review of the HERO System Book of Templates on youTube some time back; you can see it for yourself.  For one, they are way-too-low-rez for anything: if you're computer screen is less than five years old, they even look like crap on that.  if you're still using a screen that makes 72dpi look amazing, then ignore any suggestions I have about those ;)

 

Part of the reason they look so awful (and print _nauseatingly_ badly: it's like when my pushing-80-years-old mother in law tried to print on glossy paper a photo she'd taken with a flip phone a decade or two back) is the ridiculously low resolution.  The other problem is jpeg-ery.  You can see the fractal fuzz just _slime-ing_ it's way around the images, and the black itself starting to swirl within its own borders.  (I wasn't kidding:  _NEVER_ use anything from jpg if there's a chance it might see print or that a sharp, crisp image is important to you.  NEVER!)

 

Best thing for those is to drop a new transparent layer and redraw them, even if you have to trace.  Delete the jpg layer completely, and save in vector (preferred) or png (workable for _any_ screen-only application, and _most_ print shops).

 

 

Anyway, I got off track:

 

Enlarging something to make it fit your background is always, always, always bad.  You will triscuit-ize the particular element you are looking for, and no image is _ever_ better than it's worst element:  the worst element, no matter _how good_ it might actually be, will always catch the eye because it is _subjectively_ bad owing to better elements around it.

 

As noted, work with, at a minim, 600 dpi.  Make your "blank page" 600 dpi; add your elements to it.  Elements of lower resolution will, by default, be reduced in size.  Don't enlarge them (see "triscuit-izing," above).  Replace them with larger ones if you have them.  You can _shrink_ them _much_ more safely if they are png (but even they don't enlarge seamlessly), and effortlessly if they are Vector.  Vector is the _only_ format that can safely be enlarged without concern.

 

Photoshop was _terrible_ at up-rezzing images  (sometimes you just don't have a larger image you like better, you know?).  You know who is _great_ at upsizing?  And usually _free_?!

 

Weabos.  (Damn I hope I spelled that right).  Seriously:  there are anime sites, and there are weabo sites.  Find a weabo site with a fan-built up-rezing feature.  They are _better_ than any commercially-bought software I've ever tried, and depending on what you're doing and who built the software---   well, I have found some that could turn a 72dpi screen capture into a tabloid-sized poster and still look reasonable.  Some fuzziness at the edges; sometimes some blurriness, but sticking to practical-for-your-purposes sizes, you should be able to get to most any image to a reasonable size and still have a nice image.

 

I started to appreciate the talent those guys have, and that they would offer it for free like that.

 

Right up until I figured it that it was so they could turn a screen capture into a....  a, uh....   "Body pillow."

 

Then I got a little sick.  :(

 

 

Still, some of them have serious talent!

 

Also:

 

Hit Jason up just to see if you can get permission to re-color the Hexman logo- either to the 6e color scheme, or even red-white-and-blue (bolder, solid colors so that it will stand out).  If you can't get it to match the cover theme, then maybe he will at least let you make it look contemporary. ;)

 

Honestly, I don't know why the Hall of Justice Champions logo wasn't done in medium blue and chrome yellow, just as a theme, but that's probably just me.  :rofl:  

 

My last comment also goes to white space:  consider some sort of background color for your imprint, even if it's just "silver"-- anything to lose the white space.  Add color to your logo-- neutrals, darker pastels, whatever-- to the fount and some color to the cornucopia.  Realistically, the cornucopia can stay as-is; it's got a nice wood-stamp look to it.  Just consider minimizing the white space everywhere you can, to include possibly reducing the vertical space you've dedicated to "#1."  That space can stay white: comic book tradition and all that.

 

For what it's worth, having a "waving" flag was suggested over a static one because of the amount of white space in the flag.  Notice that with the waving flag, you get wrinkles and shadows, creating greys and slivers, actually reducing what is _interpreted_ as white space. ;)

 

 

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