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Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Nowhere in the 80s

Never one to leave well enough alone, I could not help but imagine how the covers of the Nowhere series might have looked had Paranoid continued publishing them into the 1980s. All right, they probably wouldn't have looked like this at all, but I think they might have gotten a little more futuristic and a little less pulp. For this exercise I learned how to type text on a curve using Photoshop's pen tool! I used that trick to create the list of contributors to the anthology, friends of mine who've written short stories in real life and who, in a parallel universe somewhere, wrote stories for this nonexistent book. Of course they would have been children at the time, come to think of it...

Anyway, I chose to superimpose a rainbow on a black Alberta as a rather obvious visual joke: it's a rainbow over a pot of black gold, a promised land for the many Canadians who immigrate here during boom times. Why would a bunch of Albertans write stories about Leaf Rapids? Maybe in the parallel universe Leaf Rapids became a tourist hub on the scale of Churchill, attracting notoriety and mystique of sufficient quantity to attract storytellers.

This cover is rather a garish mess, but many book covers share that quality. You have to design a lot of bad stuff before you can design any good stuff.

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