May 2022
1 / 13
May 2022
Jun 2022
smokesalty
May '22

Your cover/series thumbnail is literally the first impression anyone gets of your comic on a webcomic.

Your cover will inform your subject matter, genre, art style and compositional skills. Make sure you take the time to make the art look great, to show something of interest related to the story and take the time to make the typography readable and appealing.

I've seen so many people do their covers last second and I just scream internally because if you're gonna make a first impression, make it count! Take the time to make it look good I BEG OF YOU

  • created

    May '22

  • last reply

    Jun '22
  • 12

    replies

  • 886

    views

  • 9

    users

  • 42

    likes

  • 2

    links

darthmongoose
May '22

Oh god, this. So much this :point_up_2:

For inspiration, here's a pinterest board I've collected of some tutorials on cover layout plus jaw-droppingly gorgeous comics covers.

The other thing I'll say is to avoid handwritten title fonts unless you seriously know what you're going for, like say something charmingly rough and hand-made looking to match the art like Heartstopper or Charity case and you know about things like consistent letter sizing and spacing and line weight. It is SO easy to make your cover look amateurish by trying to hand write fancy bubble or block text but not getting it quite neat enough.

Most people would be a lot better off going over to Blambot or Google fonts (filter to display fonts) either finding a free font or paying like $25 for the perfect font (It's worth it, $25 is a fraction of the cost of an effective Instagram ad campaign). Then put a simple effect or two on it if needed like a stroke, a drop shadow, a basic bevel, gradient overlay etc. (Try duplicating the text, making the copy on the lower layer a darker colour and offsetting it down and right a little to create a nice comics-style hard drop shadow effect, it's hard to go wrong with that). Also avoid Fontsquirrel because people put all sorts of terrible, amateur-looking fonts on there and if you're not a designer, you probably won't know which are which. Generally, if the font looks great, you might not even need fancy effects though.
Oh and make sure there's a decent amount of space between the text and the edges of the page, but also that the text is nice and big.

MartaTod
May '22

I was actually just about to recommend Fontsquirrel because it was a rare space where fonts were handpicked by the people running the website. :rofl: My problem with it was that I never found anything good on it for comics (I did for corporate work). I would say to absolutely avoid Dafont and 1001fonts unless you know what you're doing. There are some quality fonts on there, but it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Another way to find good display and brush fonts, is to just browse the net. There are sometimes font bundles on discount or fonts that are free during promotions. Some designers even have their fonts free to download, often on Behance. I'd still say to double check the license just in case.

And if you're advanced when it comes to fonts, and have a vector program you can do this in, I suggest even outlining and tweaking fonts a bit to make that title more unique.

Google Fonts, while I fully support it since I work in UX/UI, is great as a starting point, and will do the basic job. But it's very limited when it comes to fonts with personality. MyFonts is a great place to start if you can afford to buy a font, have an idea what you're looking for and want to design your own logo.

But if I can be completely honest - if you have the extra money, and you really want to have a high quality comic logo, hire a professional (designer or letterer) to make it. It'll make a huge difference.

darthmongoose
May '22

Okay, true, Fontsquirrel is definitely miles better than 1001 fonts and Dafont, which feature all sorts of terrible fonts or even ones that have been uploaded illegally without a proper license. I have seen some pretty horrendous novelty fonts on Fontsquirrel though, and I just feel like the more limited selection on Google Fonts makes it a bit "safer" to recommend to people who don't have enough design and typography knowledge to reliably pick something nice and not get distracted by really bad novelty fonts or something. :sweat_02: I think Blambot is great because it's a small selection of kind of novelty-ish themed fonts, but they're all nicely designed and fit most genres of comics (though they're a bit limited for Romance or Slice of Life).

100% agree with this. It's SO worth it.

darthmongoose
May '22

I will keep adding more to this collection when I find ones that really pop! It can be such a pain to find a good, curated collection, so I figured I'd do it myself. :sweat_02: I hope lots of people find it helpful!

UrMom
May '22
darthmongoose

Totally agree, the cover is everyone's first impressions of your work, so it's important to put your all into it. I don't got much to add but for sites like Tapas it's good to make them simple too. The thumbnails are small so details make the covers look busy or muddy. People also really like character's faces. I did an experiment a few years ago using a cover with no characters, one where you couldn't see the MC's face, then one where they're looking at you and taking up most of the cover. People were drawn more to the latter, it could be because the character art is the make or break factor for readers (At least for comics. I know I tend to have trouble getting into a comic if the character art has really wonky proportions or a design that just doesn't work.), or there might be some psychology behind people liking to see faces. Probably a bit of both, depending on the reader, either way it's good to sketch out a few test covers and see what people are drawn to more.

Dang, do you gotta call me out like that?

arxianfall
May '22

Eh...when I get to it. My main readers come from a place where covers are non existent and Tapas and Weebtoons are backups with a good reader UI.

I'll probably do a temp cover again using a page from an episode.

RocketAxxonu
May '22

Totally agree! Covers are typically the first thing a reader sees, and honestly make all the difference as to whether they decide to have a look or not.

On the other hand, I'd also add, to those artists who are in the creative flow of making pages and find trying to do a cover a momentum interruption of sorts, it might be just as well to focus on those first even if it means throwing up a quick sub-par cover in the meantime, until doing a cover with more focused attention later. Obsessing over having the perfect cover before getting quite a few pages done and establishing a workflow on those can be a tripping point to a new comic project, especially since oftentimes for many artists their art will improve over the course of making pages, meaning focusing on a cover more in earnest later on could mean the quality is much higher than it would be trying hard early. It's just important to be aware the tradeoff of not having a particularly strong cover earlier, and that it may be harder to pick up readers.

TheLemmaLlama
May '22

Ye I'd argue you're not gonna have many readers really early anyways because you haven't gotten to the good part yet :'D Have an awesome cover prepared for where you've got enough pages out to establish your series' identity :]

GumshoeComix
May '22

Just recently changed my cover and have actually been getting a lot more traction with readers and comments, I have to thank @darthmongoose for that. i think adding it to Mystery helped a lot too

darthmongoose
May '22

Always happy to help!

When a comic is underperforming, it's sometimes not the quality of the work, it's just how and where it's being marketed. Your new cover is much more eyecatching than the old one with that punchy colour contrast and the protagonist looking out at the viewer. :+1:

1 month later

closed Jun 5, '22

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.