Alright guys! I was in New York last week, so I didn't have time to update my blog. I'm double posting for this week to catch up... therefore plenty of things for y'all to take a look at!
Whew! So I finished my Vox cover for the March 15 issue and I'm very satisfied with the way it turned out. The little icons were a pain to deal with since I had to make them individually on illustrator AND make them look less clip art-y. I'll show you the process I went through to come up with the final product :)
First Draft
I liked how the hands played a dominant and abstract role in this cover piece. However, some of the editors expressed that they wanted the cover to be more content-driven and include some aspect of the stories. The solution? Icons... which then proceeded to take over my life for two days. I had the icons originally colored, then turned grayscale... But they still looked like clip art. THEN, I had the idea of making them just outlines and I think it worked out well.
Since I worked so hard on these icons, here is my favorite one... the robot!
And here's how I played around with incorporating the icons (Ignore that some icons are repeated. I wanted to find a good composition first):
Finally... I ended up with the final cover:
I made the hands less dominant by putting a transparency. Then, I completely moved the sell lines to the bottom to even out that awkward blank space. I decided to place less emphasis on the icons by making them MUCH smaller. I thought they looked more like icons this way.
Overall, I like my cover. I still wish the hands were more dominant, but gotta satisfy what everyone else thinks!
Oddly enough, I love your second-to-last version of the cover the most. There's a great reddish color created by the circles overlapping the hands (or maybe that's just my screen), and it's the most dynamic of all of them. If the text had moved in to that center circle to keep the design balanced .... ooh, it could have been cool. But the last one definitely has some great points, too (though I wish they had written you some better/longer sell lines). Great job, though! The transparencies on the final cover also look great, and that bit of texture in the background makes it very professional.
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