The Legendary F-Rank Webnovel Cover

This is likely one of the most difficult projects I've worked on throughout my studies; a webnovel cover that was supposed to be the first in its trilogy. The goal was to create something effective that would look good and attract shounen (young male) readers but still stay within the lines of the given concept from the author - their main character, sitting down in a valley surrounded by mountains.

There were many sketches for the book cover, and they mostly had the same color scheme. But then, after a few consultations and critiques, an issue popped up - the sunset look in the background was quite strong and distracted from the rest of the illustration and typography, and it seemed impossible to tone down the orange tones.

I didn't want just the sky to overtake the amount of details and effort put into the rest of the drawing and especially lead away from the name. I've tried making the oranges more pink, making the character's sword glow as if infused with his power, making the entire background darker using multiple color and multiply layers, and even adding a glow around the character for more contrast, but it didn't seem to work.

I feel like a little switch flipped in me at that point. I was frustrated with the lack of ideas and knowledge on how to make everything work. Then, for a second, I thought, since I can't make the character brighter, because his design had dark colors in general, I would just make everything else dark. And so, midway through the artwork, I decided to turn it into a night scene. I've already redrawn everything in it multiple times, because of difficulties with the anatomy and stiffness, as well as composition, so I was thinking one more time shouldn't be all that bad. So I did, and this is the result of it.

Before I could roll on the floor in joy, another issue came to play. I accounted for and allocated the space needed for the typography that would be fit into the artwork last, but I didn't think about what kind of typography it would be, or how to execute it. It's really never been my strong side.

I was looking at typeface after typeface and settled with something that, I won't lie, looked quite horrendous. Afterwards, the feedback I got was along the lines of: "It's bold, a bit too bold for the illustration." Now it became the distracting part, and you can probably see why.

Quite a few sketches were made along the way to get to this typography, as well as brainstorming and getting suggestions and ideas from other people. There were many things that needed to stay in mind while deciding on the typeface, such as the fact that it needed to fit nicely onto the bottom of all three of the covers, the color schemes it could work with, and even the issue where many people would read it as "The Legendary Frank", which was quite funny at first, but quickly became frustrating.

I thought of reogranizing the composition of the name, to make the F stand out on its own, but then that didn't suit the illustration. I was trying to make the long title readable, from A to Z, meaning all the letters had to be big enough size to read on multiple platforms. The end step was adding a cut into a part of the F that connected to the 'rank' and making it into a dash that was there but wasn't overly distracting - after getting permission from the author of course.

Here's a little secret, I've actually been working on this project over a course of a few months. I was really inexperienced at environment design and illustration, so it took me a lot of getting used to and I still dislike drawing rocks and stones. They're just... Geometrical in a weird way when you try to put them into perspective - or at least the ones here were. I started this somewhere over summer break but I gave up on it so many times after making so many different sketches that it became frustrating. And this is actually the second time that I was in the middle of designing a Webnovel cover for the author when my project just happened to be to design a book cover in university.