I was sorting out the images on my Macbook and I came across this…

This is the original cover design I was sent as part of a mock-up for the slipcover of the Greek “Dragon Tamers” hardcover. Looks good, right?

If you’re not a gamer, reader or designer then yes – it’s shiny. Attention grabbing. Looks good.

…But there’s something not quite right. Apart from the strange character in the bottom who might be the publisher’s mascot, the book’s protagonist is a black-haired girl. So immediately, some mental alarm bells are ringing about this cover designer’s attention to detail.

Wait, haven’t I seen that guy before…?

Final Fantasy E.Maree?

That’s the cover art for Final Fantasy X, voted by Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu to be the greatest video game of all time and fifth in IGN’s “Top 25 PS2 Games of All Time“. Selling 6.6 million units worldwide, it’s a pretty big deal – the Final Fantasy series is one of the best selling video game franchises.

I pointed out the mistake to the publishers and it was redone, though I never did get an explanation as to how that happened.

The final Greek cover.

This amusing event shows that book cover designers are far too often really bad. There are plenty of great ones who can sum up a book in a simple image, and there are a lot of famous, stunning covers – but there are also thousands of ‘designers’ who think it’s acceptable to Google Image Search the keywords that are vaguely related to the work and badly edit it all together with a Photoshopped font on top.

It isn’t okay. Google Image Search images are almost all still under copyright, and sticking them all together and selling it is just profiting easily of other people’s work. There are people who work hard to create these works – and it’s not usually well-known video games that get ripped off, it’s independent artists who don’t have a chance at taking legal action when their work is stolen for commercial use.

Because of how difficult it is to be sure photo-based covers, especially foreign ones, come from open sources the illustrated covers for my work tend to be my favorites. The amount of work that goes into the airbrush-painted cover for UK Dragon Tamers 2, digitally painted Dutch DT1 and traditionally painted somewhere-Nordic-maybe-Swedish DT1 all stand above the rest for the sheer effort taken. Done well they can create a unique impression of a story’s cast.

That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of great covers made using photographs – most good covers are these days. Two of my recent favourite designs “Fallen” and “Hush, Hush” both use photographs to stunning effects.

In the end, though, there’s always people trying to take shortcuts and making things unfair for everything.

Originally posted by Emma Maree Urquhart on EmmaMaree.com

It’s time for more random links! Skiver Tuesday, I guess?

© Sam Rowley

Awesome deer photos by the award-winning and very enviable 15-year old Sam Rowley.  I love deer – this may be because I’ve never experienced the joys of them coming down from the wood to eat my plants. My old home in Inverness was close enough to the woods to have a fair few of them, though being honest I haven’t really seen many up-close. One of the characters in my novel The Network is a Kirin, a deer-like creature of Japanese mythos, and I’ve toyed with ideas for a YA novel linked to the animals. Yay deer. I could browse Sam’s gallery all day.

An article in the BBC covers the tricky topic of parents being abused by their children.Most of us will have seen kids and teens who treat their parents with disgust and anger, or more subtly walk over them, but abuse isn’t a commonly seen or discussed thing. Food for thought.

I try to use my writing to cover a lot of the darker things that people would feel less comfortable with outside of a fantasy setting. For example: both of my current in-progress works deal frankly and honestly with suicide and depression, because those are both important things that the target age range (teenagers) are going to come up against. It comes with stigma – the book dealing more heavily with it comes across as gothic, and the content in my lighter work will probably get called ‘emo’; both will attract negative attention from people who insist they have no respect for the suicidal and think they’re selfish. It all comes with the territory, and despite that it’s still an effective way of getting a message across.

There a Nepal animal sacrifice festival going on this week – the largest sacrifice in the world – where over a quarter of a million animals  ”>are killed. A difficult to believe amount, and understandably it has the animal rights activists up in arms. I’m indifferent – I’d have to be Hindu and understand more about the beliefs behind it to hold a strong opinion, really. However, I am interested in the quote in the article about how the gods would be just as easily appeased by fruit or flowers.

Morality aside, this paragraph caught my eye:

“Festival organisers estimate more than half a million people are already at the festival site.

Many of them, like Suresh, have brought their own animals to be killed. “

Festival organisers? It makes it sound like Glastonbury. Gadhimai-bury, woohoo!

In America, a man found out he was adopted as a child, and traces his mother and father only to discover his dad is Charles Manson. Yikes. D: I didn’t even know Manson was still alive, actually.

Then some inspiring Inverness news, a courageous and beautiful woman who became paralysed after a climbing accident and has still gone on to complete the Great North Run in a racing wheelchair, and aims to go on to be the first woman to sit-ski across Antarctica to the South Pole. Bless her, what an inspiration.

The heating is still broken at work, and the weather outside is frightful. So it goes.

Originally posted by Emma Maree Urquhart on EmmaMaree.com