A Tale of Two Preview Images (Patreon)

For the last couple years Matt has mostly been in charge of creating the promo images for each comic. That entails one graphic to go on our archive page, one to display on social media links, and a set of crops to go up as an Instagram carousel post (2-10 individual images).

Here's an example of promo images from last week's When We Touch comic by Noël:

A few weeks ago, I took over making the bulk of these promo images again after several years off from that duty. 

Sometimes, however, we disagree on the direction of the graphics.

This week's comic (An Ear for Euphoria by Hien Pham) is one such case!

For the Archive image, I went for the most dramatic of the illustrations from Pham's comic, as I felt it is the most eye-catching and would make people curious to click through. In my first stab at the SM Card, I chose the intimate whispering panel because it's more relevant to the actual content of the comic, but in the end I felt that the image was too passive and the proportions were too constrained so I once again used the exploding image. 

Matt saw these and was like,

The cursive font (Pacifico) takes more effort to read, so it should be used sparingly, according to Matt. He also didn't think the volcano image was the right direction, as it didn't give the reader a sense of what the actual comic would be like. He threw together this:

His first pass at the SM card was fine, but the goofy chibi faces that he used on the second one are just so silly and sweet that he thought they'd be slightly more enticing to get viewers to click. 

Sometimes when we come up with opposing graphics, I'll have to put my foot down and say, "Baby, I love you, but mine is just better." This, however, was no such case. I liked his better, pure and simple. He captured the sweetness, vulnerability, and playfulness of Pham's work, and his font selection was easy to read while remaining eye-catching. 

I posted his versions across the various OJST accounts. 

So there you go, a little look at some of the behind-the-scenes action over at OJST HQ ;)

-Erika