GarryP

You're welcome. As I said, the image is nice, just maybe that it's been applied to something it's not quite right for. Or I could be talking complete rubbish. For general book cover ideas I like to look at this article every now and again: https://www.canva.com/learn/how-to-design-book-covers/ There are lots of great insights and tips with examples of some excellent covers. For me, one of the best takeaway ideas from the article is: "Think of your cover design like a movie trailer." Grab the potential reader with an interesting image that makes them want to pick the book up. However, even after I've said what I said in my earlier post, it might be worth thinking about a more "symbolic" concept instead of the more literal idea of tripods smashing stuff up. In movie trailer terms, instead of going down the "Transformers" route of a series of obvious chase/crash/explosion scenes you could go down the route of those films where you see the trailer and at the end you're just thinking "What the heck was all that about?". I can't think of a good example at the moment but they're usually for horror films where you get lots of quick cuts that don't really show you anything but do leave you intrigued. I've attached a very quick and dirty example of an idea I had. My version is horrible - a couple of minutes with some stock photos and, yes, I've used the alien from "Alien" - but maybe there's something that can be done with it in the right hands. Or it can just be forgotten, it's probably not a very good idea in the first place.

For me, if you want to do a book cover that is immediately recognisable as "War of the Worlds" then you need to use tripods. The descriptions of the Martians themselves in the book are few and far between and, as far as I remember, we only see a single tentacle/arm in the 1953 film and in the 2005 film we maybe saw just a hand or something (if anything). My memory isn't too good but the physical form of the Martians isn't really the focus of any of the variations of the story. Disembodied leathery brains with big eyes and a beak, nothing that has any real relevance to the story itself. They could have been lizards or snails or big leaping thumbs, their form wasn't important. The heat ray is a memorable weapon but difficult to convey in an illustration without it just looking like any old laser (unless you show something melting). The red weed is more of an afterthought in most variations of the story - including the original - and isn't really important (you could remove it entirely and the story is pretty much the same). Have a look at the cover for the official sequel: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Massacre-Mankind-Authorised-Sequel-Worlds-ebook/dp/B014SV4TM6 Take away all of the text and it's still immediately obvious what the book contains - big alien machines destroying stuff. Having said that, this book: http://www.valancourtbooks.com/the-space-machine-1976.html blends "War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine" and has a few different covers, none of which have anything to do with tripods. (The story is pretty good but the covers don't give you much of an idea of what it's about.) For me, the image I get when I think of "War of the Worlds" is the Jeff Wayne album cover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Wayne's_Musical_Version_of_The_War_of_the_Worlds Tripod, check; Thunderchild, check; Heat ray, check; Victorian writing, check. Job done. P.S. I like the illustration - nice artwork, shadows and effects - but, as with carl123, I just don't think it says "War of the Worlds" to me.

The T-Power one is the closest but not the one I was think of. I originally thought it might be Apollo 440's "Electro Glide in Blue" but it's only vaguely similar and doesn't have the wavy lines that sparked my memory. I'm hoping that it will come to me if I stop thinking about it; or maybe I'm just getting confused. (I agree, they're all great starting points for an album cover.)

You're welcome. I wish I could remember the album cover but some searches that I've done didn't yield any relevant results. I'm thinking electronica from the 90's - especially for the blue one - but maybe my brain just made it up.

Some of these remind me of an album cover but I can't remember which album. Nice though.

Here's one I took in the UK in 2009 (don't know what phone I took it on). As far as I know there were no special atmospheric anomalies at the time, just a weird and spooky sunset.

Fantastic work. Bravo.

To follow on from what @toltec said... When you click to add the text to a circle with the Artistic Text tool, the place where you click is important. If you click outside the circle, the text will flow around the outside in a clockwise direction. If you click inside the circle, the text will flow around the inside in an anticlockwise direction. Pressing the "Reverse Text Path" button - to the right of the Baseline setting on the context toolbar - will switch between the two. You can then change the Baseline, as mentioned, to move the text to the "other side" of the circle if necessary. In @duff12345's original post, the object - including the text - has been flipped which is why the text looks backwards; essentially you're reading the text in a mirror. You shouldn't need to convert anything to curves, just click in the right place for the direction you want then change the baseline if necessary.

Like Mark said above, really nice work. I too especially like the mock-up. (I think a tutorial - or just a basic list of things to do - to make something similar to the mock-up would be appreciated by many people.) My major concern is that the text is off-centre and way too far to the left. (I don't know if this is deliberate so I won't call it a mistake.) My other concern is that the bottom of the helmet isn't lined up with the top of the text. There's a bit of an angle there but, again, I don't know if this was deliberate. Anyway, lovely stuff.

(Copperplate, yes that's what it's called.) I agree. If you want proper small caps then you need a font with proper small caps in it. My little tip was only a quick fix that can only work with some fonts; it's not to be taken as a best practice solution. Yeah, the small "C" is probably an optical illusion, as you say, but it still looks wrong to me. Maybe a minor manual tweak would "fix" it.

My first thought on this was that it might look a bit nicer if the heads were all of a similar size. It might not look better but it should be easy enough to try it and see what happens. My second thought is that the text looks wrong to me. The weight of the large capitals is much heavier than the small capitals. (Also, the large capital "C" looks much smaller than the other large capitals.) You can normally fix this by choosing a font where you have a number of different weights and re-formatting the smaller capitals with a heavier weight. See my attached example where the top line is just using the "Small caps" feature but the bottom line also uses a mix of "Regular" weight for the large capitals and "Semibold" weight for the small capitals. That might not work perfectly so you might have to do some more manual work to get it just right. Other than those small issues, it's a nice image.

If you're going to be doing a lot of design work then the 256GB SSD on the Vivobook will be fast but you might end up running out of space sooner than you want (unless you archive things to an external drive, which is a sensible idea anyway, as long as it's also backed up). The differences between an i5-8250U and an i5-8300H are probably negligible for most people. You probably wouldn't notice much difference between a GeForce 940MX and GeForce GTX 1050 either. As for the rest of the internal hardware, you could compare each individual item for days on end and come to no real conclusion. E.g slightly faster memory vs. slightly slower graphics, or slightly faster hard drive vs. slightly slower processor, etc. etc. It just goes on and on. My best recommendation would be to try and find one of each - or very similar - in the real world and try and use it for a few minutes. If the screen just doesn't look right to you then it doesn't matter how fast it will be, it will just keep annoying you. Similarly, you will be using the keyboard a lot; if it doesn't feel right to you then that will bug you for the life of the machine. Both machines seem to be about the same specification/price-wise so the best test is how they actually feel to use them. You should choose what feels right when it's in your hands and you'll be happy you made that choice. Of course, this doesn't help if you can't actually get them in your hands before handing over the cash. P.S. Have you thought about getting a custom-built laptop? In the UK we have https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ who make really nice machines and the cost isn't nearly as much as you might think. You can specify exactly what you want and swap the specification round until it's within your price range without making any commitment. One downside of this is that - unless you can find someone with a laptop with the same chassis - you won't be able to get the feel of it in the real world before you buy.

A rounded rectangle should look fine as long as you have the letter/line spacing right.

For the experiments in my last post I did indeed give the entire artboard an opacity of less than 100%. While AD does give consistent output across those cases - the content is always rasterised - I believe that this is either the wrong output or the output is not what the user would expect. There is no warning - or other method of the user knowing - that the entire artboard will be rasterised. The user is exporting as SVG and, while they could be aware that the SVG format can contain rasters, they would probably not expect that the entire drawing will be exported as a single raster. (This might be different for "SVG (for web)", as noted earlier, but for "SVG (for export)" the user will be expecting vector output so they can load it into other software that accepts vector input.) It is my belief that a user with a drawing that consists entirely of vector elements will expect that, when exporting to a format that caters for vector elements, those vector elements will be exported as vectors and not be rasterised. The fact that this does not happen should, in my opinion, be documented either in the Help or, more preferably, in the UI. Draw with vectors -> Export as vectors -> Get vectors. As for the results you are getting, I created a drawing with (a) a rectangle with both fill and stroke, (b) a circle with fill only, and (c) a line using the Pen tool with no fill. I got the same results as you: The circle and line were exported as vectors but the rectangle was exported as a raster. I totally agree that: this is not what I would expect; it is inconsistent; and I would suggest that this result shows that there is either a bug or AD is not performing as the user would expect it to. The SVG specification accepts both fill and stroke opacity - https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/masking.html#ObjectAndGroupOpacityProperties - and, as far as I can tell, there is no mutual exclusivity between them. Basically, I agree with you on this point, it's a problem.

I think a few different issues are getting mixed up a little here. I've just done a little experiment with AD 1.6.4.104 on Windows 10. I recreated the workflow I gave above and made three exports from the Export Persona as "SVG (for export)": * filled triangle with stroke; * filled triangle; * triangle with stroke only. Each export produced an SVG with a rasterised image of the triangle. It seems like AD is being consistent whether the shape has a fill or a stroke or both but I don't think that's what the issue is. If I've understood you correctly, you are saying that AD should export the shape as a vector, rather than a raster. I would think that that is what most people would expect. The shape is a vector, SVG is a vector format, the shape should be exported as a vector. However, I think what @DWright is saying is that, when using "SVG (for web)", AD automatically rasterises the shape because of the opacity setting and it does this so that web browsers will all show the image in the same way (I assume that it does this as not all web browsers show partial transparency of SVGs the same way). In a way, AD is taking the hassle out of displaying the exported SVG in a web page but, at the same time, the user is losing the ability to get exactly what they want because it will always be rasterised even if they don't want it to be. "SVG (for web)" is more of a: "Use this setting and all will look fine on the web even if you don't get what you were expecting". (Basically I was using the wrong export type in the first place and that brought about the problem I was having.) As for "SVG (for export)", I think you are correct that AD should export the vector with an opacity. That's how most people would expect it to work, as it does in other software, and the SVG specification allows for opacity on most elements of the drawing. So in this case I agree. Exporting with "SVG (for export)" should export the shape as a vector with an opacity rather than rasterising it. However, I disagree when you say that AD is not doing what it is supposed to do. Assuming that Serif have designed AD to rasterise all elements with an opacity of less than 100% then it's working as it is supposed to. It's maybe not working as most people might expect it to, but it's working how it's supposed to (if the assumption is correct). It's a small difference but worth pointing out. (On the other hand, if AD was not designed to rasterise then it, indeed, is not working how it's supposed to do. Only Serif can say.) Anyway, in summary, I accept that "SVG (for web)" will rasterise all partially transparent elements but I don't think it should rasterise them under "SVG (for export)". Unless someone can convince me otherwise.