Down Among the Dead Men skin design continues.
We’re starting to develop our visual design pillars. In particular, we’re trying to move away from illustrations for this one, and more towards real objects to represent the events and locations in the story. So, where there would’ve been an anatomical drawing in Frankenstein, here we have a real skull buried in the sand.
We’re also really keen to push more vibrant colours into the design of Down Among the Dead Men. Expect more treasure in future images! Yaaaar.
As the design matures, we start to lay out the elements horizontally as they would actually be in the final inklebook. This starts to give us a feeling of the flow and hierarchy. Clearly, there’s still a lot of work to be done here - the map doesn’t quite make sense in this particular layout.
Although you could certainly imagine an inklebook where you travel from location to location and chapter to chapter by choosing points on a map! The structure of Dead Men’s story could perhaps lend itself to that… but either way, we love old maps, and we’ll be sure to slot them in somewhere!
Remember, if you’d like to contribute to our design process on this, you can get involved via our Pinterest board.
Erik Temple
I like the feel (and the skull!), though I think I’d prefer that the color come from some source other than treasure–gold doubloons and colored baubles tend to make me think more of Mardi Gras pirates than real ones… I’m not familiar with Down Among the Dead Men, but maybe color could come from insects? I’m thinking necrophagous beasties, maybe gold bugs (a la Poe’s buried treasure story)?
I like the inclusion of the map–maybe it could go to the right of the story text? That would make it easily accessible during reading, and would also be the analogue of a map on the rear cover or flyleaf of a printed book…
Joseph Humfrey
Yeah, it’s true that we’d like to make it feel a bit more like they’re real pirates. And the insect idea is a great idea actually. Colourful, but deadly. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a bit of both though. There’s a fantasy element in the story itself, and I think people like the silly/humorous side to pirates too
We have actually talked about having the map available to the right hand side of the text. It’s a nice idea…
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