This morning I saw an indie pub cover that’s so bad it makes me want to cry (no, I’m not going to tell you what it is). Everything about is bad. There are at least 4 focal point elements, meaning there are none. The colors are garish. The text treatment is illegible. The background is too busy.
There’s so much decent pre-made cover art (ie, art that indie cover artist/designers have done for the fun of it/to sell on spec rather than because they’re making it specifically for a hired project. It’s usually cheaper than commissioned art, and there’s tons of it out there. Most of it is absolutely terrible, but some is amazing!) out there that I don’t understand why this happens. Yeah, if you’re trying to totally avoid AI elements, it’s harder now to find stuff than it was a few years ago, but it’s still entirely possible. Like, I know it is, I’ve JUST DONE an art hunt.
I know some of it is that… I mean… a lot of people apparently just can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad. I also know that I’ve worked with writers who have said “I could tell this wasn’t good but I didn’t have the words to explain it to the artist,” so some of it is that I have the vocab to say what’s wrong & not everyone does.
(I once sent one of my cover artists absolutely spare because there was an element on a cover that I INSISTED was in the wrong place. We went back and forth four, maybe six times, until she finally sent me a photo of herself in the pose so I could see that no, it WAS IN THE RIGHT PLACE.
And she was right. But the element I was having a problem with WAS the wrong size, proportionately to the rest of the image, so I was right about it being wrong but wrong about why it wasn’t right. And that was WITH me being able to verbalize that SOMETHING was wrong.)
I just find it so frustrating. Good cover art is really important. And ofc, IDK if the world’s general readership also has a basic difficulty recognizing bad cover art. Maybe they can’t tell either? IDK. But…yeah, IDK, man.
There are small presses I have this problem with, too. Like, I get that ok, sometimes a press’s aesthetic preferences aren’t going to match mine. But generally speaking I can tell the difference between “this is not my aesthetic” and “this is actively awful.”
And again, there’s just so much decent-to-great premade cover art out there that I find wilfully choosing to have fucking awful covers is baffling and honestly kind of upsetting. Because! Like! These are premades!
those are good covers, dang it! and also! like! yes! they cost me between $50-$200! they’re not free! they ARE fairly inexpensive! this one ⌄⌄⌄⌄ cost me like $40!
i bought the font & did the cover design myself so it might have been $60 total? is it AMAZING? no! is it fine? Yes! is it better than many? UNFORTUNATELY ALSO YES.
anyway. -sigh- yeah, that’s my friday rant, i guess. i may rant more about it later, but… yeah.
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