Infamous First Light Thumbnail/Wallpaper Design

[Bee]

As the post says Feedback is wanted Please feel free to rip and roast me in every way possible. Mainly I'd like to have feedback on how I did recreating the effect from the title. Yes I know the font is off so please avoid feedback relating to font choice.

 

[JJ Designs]

The text "Prime Plays" is slightly off from the "First Light" text (the text you tried matching), but well enough to where if you weren't me you couldn't tell the drop shadow is the wrong color and too large, and the sparks are just wrong, use paint splatters or create the effect manually, because the sparks are just not cutting it. Also get rid of that lens flare "BAD BEE!" *spritzes with water*. The background picture is great, but I think you should have added a color correction and a lighting overlay, you need to flesh out your backgrounds. Those effects.....are done so poorly they look completely pasted on, kinda reminds me of those kids who use GFX packs and claim to be "Professional Minecraft GFX'ers". Luckily the font at the bottom left pulls the eye away from those, but its still jarring to me how out of place they look. Maybe you could have had her do one of her powers in game to make it blend better or add a more awesome looking pose. There need to be a glowing to blend in, they give off light so you need to replicate that. If you're not going for her power effects (which why wouldn't you be) you still need to blend it with the background.

Final Verdict - 6/10 "I'm not mad I'm just disappointed"

Tips - You really need to work on your background work, it's just lacking in execution and detail. I recommend using brushes with different colors to add dynamic lighting to the background. The effects need to glow if it's going to look at all like it fits within the image, so using that in conjunction with dynamic lighting a glow effects (not necessarily from blend modes).

Main point - I really think it looks fine from its normal viewing platform, but those effect overlays or just soo bad it's still noticeable in some areas.

All JJ Designs critiques are meant for education and the betterment of designers only, not bashing or roasting. Just a critique and how to improve your artwork.
Thank you :3 #Roasted

- Cheers

 

[PunkJax]

The text may be a bit small for thumbnail purposes. I suggest, for branding purposes, you have some kind of consistent overlay in your thumbnails so your viewers immediately recognize it as you in their subscription inbox. This also saves you time in trying to cheaply imitate text that was custom made by professionals haha.

JJ is right in saying that the overlaid color just kind of looks thrown on top and doesn't integrate into the background all that well. It needs to blend in and integrated better. I also agree that the image of the character should either be focused closer to her face or should be a more dynamic action-y pose.

 

[Bee]

This also saves you time in trying to cheaply imitate text that was custom made by professionals haha.

I know I pretty much gave you free range to roast me so I'm gonna roll with that. I'm no professional when it comes to typography.. honestly never liked that bit and it ain't really for everyone.. however I'll agree with the cheap imitation, I could have done better and a lot of people say the same. I've been designing over 9 years at this point, I actually professionally teach it and make my living by designing so generally I'd say I'm doing something right. If I was working with the exact font they used (assuming its a font as I honestly believe its fully custom) I likely could have sat there for much longer analyzing it to replicate it perfectly. Instead of attempting to custom make letters that would contain a similar look to theirs (which likely would have looked horrible as typography is not my expertise) I decided it would be in my best interest to use a font already available to me that they had used a few times in other promotional art.

I'll agree with you on another thing if I'm a professional, which by definition I am, The guys over at Sucker Punch are just gods. One of the few companies that I look up to when it comes to games beside Blizzard. Those guys have best of the best when it comes to artists.

I actually am currently working on redoing the text as I'm honestly not happy with it myself. The duplicate behind that has the color off on it (sorta like RGB split) should be thinned and actually only showing on a few letters, I can do much better on the color if I take the time to brush the color over the gradient by hand and as JJ pointed that flare is basically me being "Bad Bee" I could custom it like the original much better, and yeah sparks likely a no go I should have spent the 10-20 minutes to do the neon particles by hand.

As for the image, the reason I have more of a 3/4th body shot is because we need to keep in mind this is a game... This game may be on a nextgen console but the textures are only made for 1080p and a zoom on the face would create such a blocky and horrible looking picture due to size of the textures that I'd have to recreate the face from scratch using mixer brush to preserve the realistic quality.

Anyway I thank you both for the ultimate roast its things like this that make me wake up in the morning and hype me with anger to make 10/10 stuff xD.

 

[PunkJax]

Haha, I didn't mean to offend with that comment, but I see how it can be read that way (oops!). By professionals, I meant specifically professional typographers/logo designers. The type you tried to imitate is definitely custom made to the logo (both T's and I's are different), so using a premade font to imitate it would be "cheap" as it saves the designer time and money. Thus "cheaply imitating professional type".

I'm also a professional designer (and I would love to teach in the future, so kudos, haha) and a lot of what I'm doing at work is getting similar to this haha. Don't forget thumbnails get shrunk down, by the way, and try to keep the logo from being too close to the edge!