Recently came across the "I Can Read Movies" series, a collection of imagined covers of paperback movie adaptations. The weathered look of the images, complete with folded up corners, is near perfect. And some of the cover images are delightful (my favorite: Highlander).
Seeing the series inspired me to try some of my own, so after a bit of time fiddling with Gimp, I've made some new covers for my "Tales of Wonder" series of games, as if they were published as Penguin Classic Editions. Originally I was thinking of Penguin books because of their artistic book covers from the 60's which I absolutely adore, but went with the simple modern look instead because the cover images I had already chosen for the Tales of Wonder series look as if they would fit in that series.
I'm happy with the end result, though there are two problems: (1) I couldn't figure out how to really make them look like weathered paperbacks. And (2), they look almost exactly like real Penguin Classic editions, to the point where it looks like I might have just scribbled my name on the bottom rather than put it together from scratch using a real one only as a color and formatting guide. Images after the jump.
Gustave Moreau's "Salome Dancing Before Herod", one of my favorite works of art, and an image that was in my head throughout the implementation of the story.
Gustave Moreau's "The Death of Sappho", or one of them, anyway. Also a beautiful work. Discovered Moreau in 1998 or 1999 when the Art Institute of Chicago ran an exhibition of his works "Between Epic and Dream" and have made it a point to look for his works ever since whenever visiting a new art gallery, even visiting the Musée Gustave Moreau whenever I happen to be in Paris (specifically, twice). Part of the pleasure of implementing this series came from the pleasure of pairing the images of Moreau with classic fantasy authors. I have two more in the series, but never finished them for one reason or another. Hopefully I will have time this year to pick them back up.
Comments
This highlights one aspect of most of the IF covers I've seen -- they're not that 'booky'. It's something to think about if you're marketing IF to a particular demographic.
Posted by: george | February 4, 2009 09:20 AM
Very true. The size and shape of IF Cover art seems to have standardized around a CD-cover type of shape. Certainly, the IFDB image size seems designed around this premise. Which makes sense if you are distributing games on some physical media, sort of, but I've always preferred a more rectangular shape, suggestive of a book. These days a small-form software box would be a similar shape and size as well.
Posted by: Peter Nepstad | February 4, 2009 01:22 PM
Can you believe it -- I just stumbled across this tonight:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3067562&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
Posted by: george | February 5, 2009 12:53 AM
George - I can't believe it!!! Page after page of computer game book covers! And plenty based on the old Penguin classics. Some good, some bad, some completely awesome.
Posted by: Peter Nepstad | February 5, 2009 03:33 PM
Simply, you should no bothered of "standards" of covers in IF. Here at Spanish community we have two places to put our covers: one that follows the Babel conventions, and another that don't. So we have plenty of models of covers for all: DVD, CD, old good Spectrum cassettes. More than one have several of the same in different format.
You can cast an eye here:
http://www.caad.es/modulos.php?modulo=galeria&id=6
And here, for Babel format:
http://coverarts.deviantart.com/
Regards,
Posted by: Urbatain | April 9, 2009 03:26 AM