why is the cover for our violent ends so much... worse... than the cover for the previous book (these violent delights)
Well, to start with, an upright, flat rectangle isn’t the most visually dynamic or interesting shape in the world to anchor your design to, lol. It also commits the sins of:
A substantially more garish bevel on the text (bevel = metallic-ey dimensional effect). Also a drop shadow now? Why????? Why drop shadow???? The sort of pale, colder gold tone of the text also matches nothing in the illustration in terms of color, whereas the silver text on TVD was echoed in the silver of the sword metal. It provides a nice subtle little bit of cohesion on TVD that we’re missing on OVE. .
A much weaker silhouette + overall visual language to the main illustrated lockup. The sword shape is clear on TVD, but the other elements are also thoughtfully placed to gave the impression of organic randomness, which nicely contrasts the rigidity of the sword without impeding readability. The colors and values of each item (dragon, sword, flowers) work together but are also individually appropriate and appealing. The edges create a clear and compelling shape that contrasts cleanly against the black background-- and that clean contrast is itself a contrast to the more dense and layered parts of the illustration. Inception but for contrast! If you squint at OVE, on the other hand, it’s not immediately clear what you’re seeing, other than fire-- the flowers look like they’re made of mud, the lighter (?) at that suggested scale is kind of a visually ambiguous and blocky-looking item to put front and center, and the whole thing forms a distinct oval shape that undermines any sense of the organic we probably should be getting from the foliage and fire that might provide interest. The dragon’s body is also wrapped weirdly-- it looks very tight to the lighter, but its body curvature is more rounded than the lighter would be. It’s a small thing, but our brains do clock it as “off”. The flame coming from the upper left becoming the dragon’s body is a nice idea, but it isn’t reading nearly well enough to carry the awkwardness of everything around it. .
A misguided background color change. Nearly identical, in fact, to the one executed by BLOOD & HONEY, with its red background compared to its predecessor SERPENT AND DOVE’S black one, which I talked about at length. But we actually have kind of the inverse problem: going from black to red for B&H introduced a new contrast that threw rendering flaws into relief and made the cover far more bright and “busy”, while here the red is far less contrasted with its illustration than the black was, putting murky midtones against murky midtones and washing out our aforementioned good contrast of TVD’s illustration/ text lockup against its black background. And like, the thought process behind changing the background color is obvious and sensible-- how do you replicate a design as closely as possible for marketing/ visibility reasons but make it distinct enough not to be confused with the original? You leave the layout the same but change the color in a big bold way! And red is a very logical place to go from gold/silver/white/black. But changing a major component of your design, in theory, requires recalibration of other aspects in turn to make the whole cover as functional as the original. I would actually have liked to see this with a white background (and a whole different lockup, but--). It would have restored our ~ contrast and the duality/ stark opposites of black/white seems appropriate for the Romeo and Juliet thing. To its credit, I appreciate the presence of the pattern on the background, and it has a Subtle Gradient which we usually love, but goddam, it just looks really bad against that art. There is so much cowardice in the dark murky colors on this thing. .
Fire effects.......... not good
Our man Billelis did the TVD cover, and without googling I am........ pretty sure he did not do OVE. Look at the beautiful, crisp, glowing gold reflection of the dragon on the sword from TVD, the kind of realer-than-real-life metallic rendering that I think of as Bill’s signature:
Vs..... whatever’s happening here:
The execution is simply Not As Good on a technical level, duller and more ambiguous re: the illusion of objects interacting in physical space. Idk, maybe we couldn’t afford Bil for the sequel. Good, honestly. Bleed em dry, Bil.
And YES, that is the cruel prince font. 🥴
