UseYourIllusionII said:
I did not mean I didn't like the text on the first logo, I didn't like how you placed it.
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Also, just because they made his name large in the official poster doesn't mean it looks good...and it just doesn't look good on your R1 cover at all.
I was so happy with the R1 once I completed it I thought I couldn't possibly match it with the R2. I did take your advice and slightly reduce the size of Harrison Ford's name - but the reason it's still prominent is that it's a very American thing. If text is too large it's true that it can look unprofessional - but I don't feel that's the case.
Also, if you changed the tint of the yellow on the R2 you could get a yellow that would work very with blue...and if you use a lighter shade of a darker blue, instead of deep dark blue, you can make the pictures stand out on the back.
I've printed the full cover:
And shown it to a good friend of mine who is a graphic artist. I asked him specifically what he thought of the background colour - one of the biggest reasons being that I almost made it darker before printing. He said he really like it and it worked very well with the cover. The only details he didn't like was that he thought the photos on the reverse were placed too high - and weren't well enough connected. I disagree with the latter because Blade Runner is not a movie which dumbs-down to the audience, and so I think the connection between the photos doesn't need to be "bleeding obvious clear".
Now contrasty he thought the Exorcist cover was an example of a very clear and obvious link between the two photos - and even this is a bit of a problem for me, because I only used the left face because it linked well, other then that I really didn't like the photo. But still I'm very happy with it.
Blue is a very American colour, and although I hadn't thought of it at the time my friend said another thing he liked about it was it had a subliminal undertone of the traditional "green and gold" Aussie colours, without being at all obvious. The colours marry very well, and I think that as a more European design it holds up, whereas an American audience may not like it as much as if the background was dark blue and the text was the traditional blade-runner red.
I'd like to take this opportunity to go back to the Jurassic Park cover as well (excluding the R1 blade runner I've printed all my covers listed in the first post so far). I'll just compare to the
Ric Easton's cover which I really don't like:
My friend also like my Jurassic Park cover, saying he thought the front was perfectly laid out -which I'm glad to hear, considering the effort I went to to ensure that it was - If you remember some of my "WIP" previews I posted I had tried having all the text the same height, but I was resolved to basically using the same ratio as seen on the JP/LW R4 cover.
But I think more importantly, Ric's cover just shows me how awful the African font looks when used with the official logo. The most awful thing is he has the real Jurassic Park text above the logo, and I don't think it works (especially using that awful font!) I don't like what he's done on the back - using the African font there too. The Lost World log is supposed to be cracked, and the Jurassic Park III logo for me doesn't work with the letter "I" instead of the claw swipes. Furthermore there seems to a large number of problems with his full resolution cover - hard edges, low-resolution text blown up way too large without even correcting its slant, or smoothing it better - there's all kinds of trouble with the red especially on the front logo, making me think he didn't smooth out his source the way I did prior to saving the final image (and it's really easy - all I did was take the B&W channel, increase the contrast by 80 or so and then converted the black and white image to red - this removes all original JPEG artefacts - AND you could probably blow the image up 200% from the source and it would still look fantastic when printed).
Still each to their own.