Dead Stop

First cover of the year finished. Hopefully the first of many!

The logo part was done in Illustrator, i then skewed it and faked the 3d effect, then dropped it onto the background in photoshop and added some lighting and stuff. This is available as an ebook from Abaddon Books.

Cover Design - Update

PLASTIC

by Christopher Fowler

Up until 3 days after the print deadline this cover didn't exist. I'd mocked up loads and loads of cover designs for this book over a period of weeks, and none of them were ever quite right, before finally settling on a photofit style thing (below). 
Anyway, whilst hurriedly designing the books' interior (having already blown the deadline) it suddenly dawned on me that a simple black and white scalpel/text layout I'd put together for the title page looked far more striking than the proper cover image, so I completely redesigned the whole thing that afternoon!

Some of the many roughs, sketches and mockups I did:

In the end I reused a few of these discarded ideas on the full cover design.

Ravenstone

Ravenstone is a new Children's and Young Adult publishing imprint set up by Rebellion. For the last few weeks I've been doing all the branding and stuff for them in anticipation of the launch, starting off with a basic logo design, but applying that style to all the promotional items, sales sheets and website etc. There's still a lot to do, as they haven't actually published a book yet, but here is some of the stuff I've done so far.
First up, and most important, was the logo. I offered up quite a few options when designing it, just sketching loosely in photoshop:

Luckily, everyone was pretty much agreed on the best ones on this list (the sketches around the 30s), so we whittled this list down to about 3 options and I went from there.

I ended up taking the type idea from the bottom right one, and adapting the top 3 into one idea (1d). The only thing I really didn't plan for in the sketches was flipping the raven so he comes towards you rather than facing away. Once I'd started working in illustrator he just didn't look right with his back towards you, and by having his head facing forwards I could make the eye and beak bigger and more prominent, which gives him a bit more character.
Here are some alternative colour options. I'm hoping to expand on these, adapting the colours to match whatever art the logo has to sit on.

Below is the banner I came up with for the main Ravenstone website. I took the basic logo and changed it into a full illlustration, drawn using a combination of vectors from InDesign and Illustrator, then adding some texture and shadows etc in Photoshop. I'm quite keen to go back to this and either animate (the windmill could move, the grass and tree could wave in the wind, the bird could fly in and land! quite excited by the options here) or add detail to it as time goes on. This is a kid's book line after all, and I'd really like the website to be as visually interesting as possible.

Next job is to make the Ravenstone typography into a full, workable font which I'm in the process of doing now. Been teaching myself to use Fontographer, so it'll be one of my first jobs with that. So far I've only worked out the lower case letters.

To find out more about Ravenstone (and to see all the branding in situ) please check out their

website    //    blog    //    twitter

The Bunker

The Bunker is a comic and games shop in Havant, Portsmouth - This is the logo I came up with or them.

2000 AD/Rebellion Design Stuff

I don't ever really bother putting anything on here about the design work I do at Rebellion, so here's a few of the more interesting things I've done recently. Most of my time day-to-day is taken up with the design and production of 2000 AD, the Megazine, Graphic Novels and the Solaris and Abaddon books, but I always enjoy working on stuff that's a bit different.

First off is the 'manga-sized' Dredd graphic novels we're putting out. 'Manga-sized' actually means 'B' format, which is a pretty standard UK novel size (128x198mm). We did quite a few tests at different sizes to make sure that the speech bubbles where still readable and that the art looks as good as ever, and the B size seems just about right. Personally I would have prefered something slightly squarer so the art fitted larger on the page, but a custom page size would have cost much more to print and defeat the point of the smaller sized books (and would probably have only added 10mm on to the width of the art anyway) so it's a small quibble.
There's quite a few in the pipeline, but I can only show a couple of the covers at the moment. Really excited about them though. Like with the Case Files series it was good to present some classic stories in a new way. We wanted these to looks a bit more book-y than our usual GNs, so as not to immediately alienate people who wouldn't usually want to read a comic on the train or whatever. Hopefully we've done that.
The artwork on both of these editions is by Mick McMahon, definitely one of my favourite Dredd artists. It wasn't a conscious decision to use him on both covers, but his art just fit the space left by the design. I'm hoping to get a decent selection of the other Dredd artists on some of the later volumes.

This is a bit random: A recruitment campaign for Rebellion that's going in Develop Magazine and on their website. Usually jobs like this get banged out in 5 minutes flat as various deadlines are always looming, so it was nice to take a bit more time on one. Considering how much great concept/3D art we have floating round the office it's surprizingly hard to find pictures to use for this kind of thing, as very often any game in production is still top-secret, or licensed from a big company who'd take weeks to approve any artwork - hence these being entirely type-based.

Here are a couple of Judge Dredd 'in-world' logos I did a while ago that haven't been used for anything yet (although watch this space). Tons of stuff I do like this doesn't ever get to see the light of day, so here they are:

Below is a selection of some of the (many) character/story logos I've designed over the years for 2000 AD. The Zombo one is a personal favourite, but I'm happy with the Numbercruncher logo too.

Zombo created by Al Ewing & Henry Flint

Ichabod Azrael created by Rob Williams & Dom Reardon

Numbercruncher created (and owned) by Si Spurrer & PJ Holden

Indigo Prime created by John Smith & Chris Weston

(although this logo gets used on artwork by Edmund Bagwell)

Cursed Earth Koburn created by Gordon Rennie & Carlos Ezquerra

Samizdat Squad created by Arthur Wyatt & Paul Marshall

Lastly are some graphic novel cover designs. The Harlem Heroes book is based on the Team's kit from the story, and the ball and logo are lifted off the interior art. I've no idea who made the original Logo but I think it's great!

The Ichabod Azrael ones are concepts for a US edition to be released in 2012, but it's not yet confirmed and these may not get used. I quite like the block of text though. I did this in the same week as the Rebellion advert above. Can you tell?

I should probably point out that all this stuff is © 2011 Rebellion A/S, apart from Numbercruncher which is © 2011 Simon Spurrier & PJ Holden. It's also aces!