affinity designer A “Railway Detective”-inspired book cover experiment

[GarryP]

Just something I knocked-up for fun, not for anything real.

Based on the covers for the “Railway Detective” series of books by Edward Marston (stories are set in the 1850/60’s, or thereabouts).

The fonts aren’t quite right – I couldn’t be bothered to search for better ones – but if anyone can give me links to better, free-to-use, fonts then I might ‘fix’ it later.

[peter]

Nice, did you want have a look at this and see what floats your boat? Do you have any images that inspired you?

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/452259987566133630/

Then go here and see what's similar to what you want. They have an font identifier tool to tell you what font has been used in the image you've uploaded.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/matcherator

 

Hope it helps.

[Alfred]

18 hours ago, peter said:

tool to tell you what font has been used

Well, Garry did say

22 hours ago, GarryP said:

The fonts aren’t quite right – I couldn’t be bothered to search for better ones

but (for what it’s worth) my ‘go to’ font identification site is What Font Is.

[sansnom]

Hi, for searching for fonts online, there are also : https://www.myfonts.com/fr/pages/whatthefont

Thank you for the other two search sites that I didn't know about. 😘

[pioneer]

Lovely colour balance on the illustration, I like how you have faded the colour into the image, how did you achieve that and  just out of interest what font did you use?

[GarryP]

The ‘fade’ was done by adding a rectangle with a gradient fill from orange at the top to transparent in the middle to orange again at the bottom, with some tweaking.

I used various fonts, which bit of text were you wondering about?

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, sansnom said:

Hi, for searching for fonts online, there are also : https://www.myfonts.com/fr/pages/whatthefont

Thank you for the other two search sites that I didn't know about. 😘

There’s also Identifont, which uses a series of questions to identify fonts by appearance.

[pioneer]

4 hours ago, GarryP said:

The ‘fade’ was done by adding a rectangle with a gradient fill from orange at the top to transparent in the middle to orange again at the bottom, with some tweaking.

I used various fonts, which bit of text were you wondering about?

@GarryP The fade I will work on, very effective thank you.  The title "Ticket to the Grave" is what I would like the name 

[GarryP]

That font is “Bondrians Regular”. I probably got it from dafont.com .

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, GarryP said:

That font is “Bondrians Regular”. I probably got it from dafont.com .

You get some nice extras (ornaments) if you shell out US$14 for a commercial licence.

https://arterfakproject.com/product/bondrians

[SolidSnake2003]

Great job on your cover. Looks really good

[peter]

I saw a very similar book in a charity shop last week, after coming back from Crich and Matlock Bath last week: the first words in that book were Euston Station.

[GarryP]

9 hours ago, peter said:

I saw a very similar book in a charity shop last week

The book you found is a copy of the same book that I have in my collection which I used for reference when I made my version of the cover.

An ‘eagle-eyed’ viewer may notice that I used the same painting as was in the original cover but I used a different part of it – the little boy on the right of the original has moved to the left in my version.

I also changed the names on the cover to be names of characters in the book.

[peter]

Yes, I noticed that too. It similar situation to when a book or DVD has a different cover design for different regions. Sometimes both designs are just as good and you can't reject any of them.