I've started doing a little visual design work to prepare Exoworld for prime-time.
Right now this is very basic. I had the idea of doing a very simple set of logos, one for the cover and a couple others that'll come up as design elements in the page layout.
At this point I'm just blocking out the silhouettes, and I didn't get a whole lot done because I'm really wanting to go to bed and have been for the last hour.
I decided that the text for the title will probably be minimalistic, unless I hire someone to really do it better.
There are actually three versions I've iterated on, one with cross-bars to show the nucleotides, one with a hydrogen-bond notation style hexagon pattern, and this clean version. The downside of the clean version is that it's not clear that the X is supposed to be a helix.
The upside of the clean version is that I like it more, so there's that.
One piece of field research I have to do is investigations of how other people draw DNA helixes (helices?) to figure out an option that looks better for the nucleotides if I were to go that route.
Also pictured is a little design that features Exile with punch-outs for its moon and the Icarus. I was toying around with a version of this that also includes the moon and Icarus as separate orbiting objects, but didn't feel happy with the way it read visually or how I'd use it as a design element given its odd shape. I'm still not happy with the way the Icarus reads, but that's something for another day at this point.
Obviously all I've got right now are black and white, though I did actually do some stuff in playing with colors that didn't lead anywhere.
One question is whether I want to do a move toward a more realistic style (e.g. letters in relief), make the text more interesting in an "unrealistic" manner (e.g. erosion, light-bleeding), or leave it plain.
I'm thinking of probably leaving it plain where it features in the cover, either on a plain background with other text (in an homage to Traveller), or against an illustrated background.
But we're a long way to go. I should have more variants shortly, though I really need to sit down and just get going on the text. I did a lot of other writing today, so I didn't work on Exoworld directly.
