Fitting For A Lady Cover Process pt. 1 (Patreon)

I was hoping to have a more refined sketch direction at this point but I'll save that for the next post, I got distracted by cleaning up the comic and getting all the text in.

These thumbnail covers are where everything always starts for me. Cover ideas are frustratingly limitless, so I try to narrow it down with a couple of priorities:
Say something about the dynamic of the couple or the content of the story, show off how hot💦 they are, and failing both of those, at least be colorful and eye-catching😅.

Marketing and sales understandably gets a bad rap, but I've learned the principle of it is something I can get behind--I'm not trying to push my product on someone that doesn't want it, I want my cover to speak authentically and clearly to the kind of person that will enjoy what I made for the same reasons I enjoyed making it.
I don't think striving for mass appeal is a good way to make art anyways.

Talking about typography:

I kinda learned this process for doing logo stuff through working in the mography/animation industry. I didn't take naturally to typography because I always had this notion that there were secret rules I didn't understand. 

I'm sure there are high level text/typography designers out there that consider things I'm not even aware of, I've come to appreciate typography and logo work as being very similar to drawing, where the most important thing is clarity of communication.

My process for this is to just scroll through all my fonts and pull out the ones I think are even a possible match for the tone and genre, mostly using the same layout. So long as it's legible at a small scale and doesn't seem too cheesy or remind me of something I don't want associated with it, I feel like I'm in a good place. I just need to make sure you can still read it in thumbnail size.

The next step is to push the letters around until they don't even look like words to my brain anymore 😂 I've talked to other designers and they've said something similar, that eventually they're just weird shapes and you're trying to arrange them in a way that feels balanced and comfortable.

I'll usually do a little bit of hand drawn flourishes on things just to give it a bit more character. I think these are the two I'm liking most so far but I'm going to stop thinking about it until I can place it on top of cover art direction I feel good about.

I can't really explain why I like these ones, but they feel kinda formal and business-like and just a bit antique with their serifs, while still having a lot of soft roundness.

Happy Thursday everyone! ♥