Saturday, December 31, 2011

Chauvinistic Re-Mixed

Not a new cap, but some alternate designs.
If you are looking for a new cap, then I'm sorry to say that I don't have one for you.  Instead this is just some alternative designs inspired in part by comments in the original "Chauvinistic"

To catch up people that haven't read the original post, I started working on a design for this cap, but wasn't really happy with it.  This is about as far as I took it (it was nowhere near done), before going into a different direction:


Instead of tweaking it to make it work, I abandoned the idea of using my newer layout, and went with an older layout.  This is what I posted as the finished product:


I wasn't entirely happy with it, but I think it was o.k.  The main issue bringing back to this design was the amount of text.  In my newer layouts, I try to keep the image a bigger focus.  So... less room for text.  My older design was more geared for a lot more text, so it just worked better here.

But as Dee and Steffi both offered some suggestions, I figured I should give them a try and see what came of it.  Before I show you any of them, I should mention that none of them are finished products.  I can't call them that, as I am not happy with how the turned out.

First up is really just making the original design a more finished and slick product.  I followed the color scheme and background I used in the final submitted version.


I tried to take Steffi's suggestion of making the text boxes less opaque, so that you could see the image behind them. But he problem is the image behind the is really kind of busy.  Lots of lines (books, shelves, the Hennessy box...) that distract from the text.  By the time I got the background opaque enough that they didn't distract, you could barely see through them at all.  And that in itself was distracting... kind of a voice in the back of my head saying 'what the hell is that behind the text'.

Now as you can see I did add some to the story, so that the text matched up on both sides.  Thats important to me, as this design is just screaming 'balance'.  That is why the title is centered and evenly spaced, and why my watermark is the same.  But I don't really like this type of even balance.

I did try to work on making the text smaller, but I try to always make the text very legible.  And I could only make this text a little smaller before I found myself squinting to read it.  And that slight decrease in size didn't help me move anything around, so I didn't bother working farther in that direction.

Instead I completely ignored the text, and designed it up like I would like to see it:


I like this design.  The balance is a lot better, but still not perfect.  But the problem with this one lies in the image.  The upper right hand corner is just so empty.  and of course, I only have half the story.  That is obviously a deal breaker.

So next, I focused in on Dee's suggestion.  Flipping the image around and making the text boxes diagonal.  This one took quite a bit more time than the others, as the path I had to draw for the text was a little more complicated than a square or rectangle.


I think this is visually more interesting than my first swing, but it still has the same problem.  To much text.  And now this opens up some bigger empty spaces, primarily the upper left corner.  

I still think the finished product I presented in the previous post is still the best one.  But it was fun to get in and really show some different ways to present this.

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