Minimalist Book Cover for “The Invaders”

I’m doing a little experiment this evening — pushing myself to see if I can reach 10 stars worth of assignments before midnight for this week’s feature The Twilight Zone episode, The Invaders,  — making an attempt to maintain a decent level of quality and also peruse the Assignment Bank for interesting challenges that will fit the subject material.  I am going to give myself 5 stars towards The Invaders for GIFs already completed (You Best Clear Offa My Roof, and my poster + mini-GIF for the Episode of the Week This Week on ds106zone: The Invaders) — and I am going to seek out work that will NOT evolve into GIFs for the next couple of hours …

First I’m taking a run at former UMW #ds106 student Nancy Belle’s (@bellekid) Design Assignment 960: Minimalist Book Cover.

In approaching this assignment, I decided on a primary dark cover (the episode is quite dark, taking place at night and with minimal lighting), maintaining clean lines with a simple san serif text, and building the limited images out of existing primary shapes within photoshop, going with shades of grey to complement the black. (The episode was shot in black and white anyway!) . While my original plan was to place the saucer on the roof, and include a silhouette of the giant lady holding her knife through a window in the hut, I decided to simplify things and only show the saucer in the sky, and the hut on the horizon.

To balance out the larger title text at the top, I added an author line and a “based on” reference line at the bottom — keeping the lines of the text long and linear, and thus hopefully low-key. Each was reduced to 40-50% Opacity so as to not stand out in relation to the title and the other two images.  I also applied a reduced opacity to the 95% grey rectangle that provides the “sky” — trying to find a shade of grey that suggested a dark sky without being too light.

In hindsight, I might like to see how this would have turned out with a non-primitive constructed hut — something that might more accurately reflect a curved, sloping roof slightly slanted walls — but my timeline is calling for compromise — and I need to keep this minimalist.  And as I take a final look at the image before posting, it would be nice to go with a gradient of lighter to darker grey for the sky as you move upwards — suggesting some light in the distance on the horizon, but fading to the dark of space as the eye rises.  However, it is time to post.

As I look at the star count for this assignment, I think it’s a bit high — 3 1/2 stars for this, as opposed to only 2 stars for an @iamTalkyTina Twilight Zone animated GIF?  I typically spend a lot more time on most animated GIFs than I spent on this.