This week I've been working on cover designs for Blood In The Margins and I've narrowed it down to three choices. I've just created a poll so that you can vote for your favourites, but I wanted to talk about the design choices and process a bit more too. If you're not interested in that and just want to go and look at the designs and vote for one, skip to the bottom of this update!
Digital mockups of three zines with different potential covers for Blood In The Margins
My aim with the cover for this game is to evoke the fiction that has inspired it, whether that's the "magic school" end of dark academia or the crime fiction side of things. Those two genres have quite different approaches to cover design, and figuring out how to strike a balance has been hard. For two of these covers I've fallen back on my favourite approach in recent years, which is to have the graphic design be driven by interesting typography. Option 1 makes use of the floral design I drew for the banner image of this campaign. Option 3 tries to evoke Penguin's clothbound classics line (and hopefully doesn't come so close to aping their style that I'll get sued. This design is subject to change!).
The second option is making use of a stock image from Adobe that I sincerely hope isn't AI generated. It doesn't look it to me, and it isn't marked as being AI generated, but it's becoming harder and harder to tell.
Let me know what you think, and if you have a favourite! There's every chance that I'll play with more covers between now and launch, but in the meantime this is what I'm working with.
