Squares: series of covers, template, different versions

[ginandchthonic]

Description:
A series of covers, all with the Crown of Thorns wordmark and a general scheme of teal blue and ocean themes. L-R: Bonus Audio, with vintage microphones; Audio Zip Files, with a zipper revealing a beach scene; and The Pod'rama, with an illustration of two people walking on a beach and a darker, more distressed blue background.

Squares:
series of covers, template, different versions

Links to ... all the stuff:
Crown of Thorns Pod'rama on Archive of Our Own
Crown of Thorns library on the Internet Archive
(The Pod'rama has an overall rating of Explicit, though chapters are also individually rated. Supplementary audio material may contain coarse language.)
Crown of Thorns Pod'rama on Fanlore

Credits:
Microphone and zipper images: iStock
Dove-and-serpent CoT logo in the wordmark: Shae-C
Wordmark: me
Wordmark font (slightly altered, and also used elsewhere in the design suite): Caslon Antique family
Sans-serif font: Alegreya Sans
Various textures and things in the Pod'rama cover (and elsewhere in the design suite): DesignCuts
Digital illustration on the Pod'rama cover: me

Notes:
I said last year, only partly joking, that I wished I'd had my bingo card before I started designing for Crown of Thorns, because it would have been a perfect fit for the Series of Covers square (which in fact I never ended up filling). This year, dangit, I am going to talk about Crown of Thorns, in the context of these covers, which I did design after receiving my bingo card, even if they did come out of the templates and visual direction of the rest of the project.

All three of these covers fit into the rest of the design suite for Crown of Thorns, most of which you can see neatly laid out in a grid on the Internet Archive page. A few other people did some early design work before launch, the actual artwork was created by a whole range of artists, and there were individual items, such as the zine, that were designed and laid out by other people, but I ended up with the vast majority of the design and layout work for this year-long project.

I think what I said, during one of the initial project planning meetings, was, "sure, I can design a cover!" I then presented four or five options to the rest of the planning team, who gave feedback and finally picked one. That overall work cover did, I think, wind up on the Soundcloud playlist posted by Podfixx, the narrator, but didn't endure anywhere else. I think I might have also mentioned at the time that if we were going to be creating promotional graphics for a series of this size, some kind of consistent look might be good, and helpful for anyone else who did design work. I did wind up setting out a few rough guidelines, including sea and rose imagery, a palette of blues, ivories and soft reds, and three fonts, which in practice ended up being usually two: Caslon Antique (the same font, altered, which is used in some of the more iconic English Good Omens covers), Alegreya, and Alegreya Sans.

As the project geared up, I made headers for the various CoT social media accounts (still sticking with the sea-and-roses theme) and made an album cover for the soundtrack (we have a soundtrack! composed for us by Nuitarie, an actual composer! it's fantastic!) I had by this time more or less stumbled into the Crown of Thorns header/logo lockup (wow I wish I was a methodical designer! but I am not) and as we got into the weeds of posting, and requests for credits graphics (which came out with every episode) and announcement posts came in, and nobody else stood up enthusiastically volunteering to create them, I realised that What I Had Here was...

...was the kind of long-term, repeating project I have long experience of through work. And I was going to need templates.

You can have a look at a chapter posting, with the whole row of chapter-posting templates in it, here on the tumblr account. I made... wow. There were, I think, 81 chapter releases in total, and each one had a pre-release announcement in two formats, square and the 12:9 social media size, plus the release announcement, plus credits. Plus the chapter art shell, which was a separate beast, and required the artwork from that chapter's artist and the chapter title, written out in my hand by me using a dip pen and then scanned and converted because in late December 2019 after presenting some two dozen different script fonts to the planning committee and having them all rejected (and, frankly, not quite liking any of them myself) that sounded like a great idea.

Anyway, every month or so I'd sit down for a day and turn into a rectangle factory and crank out a whole series of these bois, as far as we had information/material for (sometimes we had minor characters not yet cast, or didn't have an artist, so I'd go that far and then stop). And my working photoshop and indesign files multiplied like biology class fruit flies, because I didn't want to throw anything out in case something needed editing, or I... died of the plague or something (which was suddenly no longer a joke but a genuine concern) and someone else had to pull my files and take over.

I do think, looking back on this, that I might have gotten a bit overly complicated in my initial designs, especially with the chapter cover shells, and I wish now I'd thought to run them by, not merely the planning team, but maybe an outside set of more design-oriented eyes. I also wish I'd hit on the Crown of Thorns lockup by then, which I (see right) had not. Of course, in a project like this, once you've posted a couple with one layout, you're a bit locked in, regardless of whether you think to yourself, every time you open the template, "I'm not sure why I thought all those horizontal colour stripes were a good idea." (They were inspired by book covers, is why, but still.) (The found poem artwork in the cover to right, using the script of The Tempest, is by AJfanfic.)

The bonus interview and blooper content were both later ideas— LenaLawlipop and head editor UnholyCrowley, respectively, came up with those and made them happen. For the interviews, I did a stock search for "vintage microphone" with a very vague idea of what I wanted—and the first of those antique microphone shots on a wooden table came up. That stock photographer was, let me tell you, extremely good to me. The aesthetic perfectly suited my internal ideal of the project, I thought it went well with the chapter art and the other designs without being the same, the colours were right... and there are a lot of them. This one photographer's choices (and vast collection of cool vintage stuff!) shaped my entire direction for the Crown of Thorns bonus material graphics, and also influenced the graphics I made for some of our special promotions.
I added elements like seashells and roses. And as more rectangles were needed, I started ripping the images apart in Photoshop and building my own suitably themed ones with the pieces and other additions, like the rose-vase-and-seashell one above right, which was used for text profiles of project team members on tumblr.

But I'd also reached a point where I, more or less, knew what I was doing. If I got a new design ask, I wasn't alone in the dark with Photoshop and the search for inspiration. I knew what my Crown of Thorns look was, and could take the new request or concept and fit it in.

This applied even to things like our Birthday Greeting to the World, which while it uses different imagery, still came out of that same stew of aesthetics in the "design corner" of my brain. And —to return to topic— to the three covers at the top of the post, which I put together rather quickly to top off the download bundles I'd made of all 50-odd(!!) hours of audio from the project. Derived from the elements and templates from all my previous work, these were the fastest thing about that final stage of my contribution to Crown of Thorns Pod'rama—they went together like anything.

I don't know if I can wrap up this unexpected torrent of words into a point of any kind... maybe that Crown of Thorns, overall, turned out to be a quite successful fusion of fanwork and my real-world work experience. At any rate, regardless of my feelings on the horizontal colour bars on the chapter covers, I'm overall fairly pleased with the general "CoT design package".

Comments

[peasina]

I don't know the series, but these covers are all so gorgeous! I particularly like the zip files one - so clever and perfectly balanced. Amazing work!

[annapods]

😍😍😍