The first Street Wolves campaign, Dead Hand, was funded on Kickstarter through the Street Wolves: Turbo Edition crowdfunder. I recently worked with art wolf Nataly who has contributed a ton of art to Street Wolves and she’s joy to work with.
I thought it would be insightful to take a moment and talk about how it came together. If you’re a table top gaming creator, maybe it’ll help you come up with a cover for your game/adventure/whatever.
Inspirations
Unlike the adventures that have been previously published (or will be published very soon), Dead Hand is a globe spanning campaign that builds to a world ending threat. When thinking about it, it felt like a spy or thriller motif might be a good fit.
Side Note and Potential Warning: This idea could be bad, actually. The strength the Street Wolves “brand” is leaning into synthwave/1980s style. Going away from it could be risky. I will have one “product” that doesn’t look like the others! That’s a risk I’m willing to take though. Part of why I’m doing this is to try new things. There will be plenty of synthwave covers in the future. Dead Hand feels a little different and therefore I can justify this decision. Take this reasoning with a grain of salt when designing your own covers.
1960s Paperbacks
When I think “spy” or even “thriller” there are of course modern interpretations of the genre, but my mind immediatly leaps to the 1960s. And the 1960s was a golden age of paperback novels with amazing covers.
I viewed a lot of images of old paperback books, trying to dig into their aesthetics to figure out how I could apply them to Dead Hand. And while doing this, I was keeping in mind my budget. I knew I could potentially afford only an little bit of art, so something more abstract would work well with that a small budget mind. Commissioning a couple of artistic assets versus a full blown background with figures is a big price difference.
The books that really appealed to me were the Penguin releases you can see in the sample images, the red ones. The images were more abstract and there was plenty of room for somewhat plain looking text at the top.
Danger 5
Now this is a weird one, bear with me. The show Danger 5, the first season especially, is near and dear to my heart. If you’ve never heard of it, I urge you to check it out. Anyway, spoilers for one of the very last scenes in the first season…
…the Danger 5 team is having a party and agent Ilsa gestures over to agent Jackson to come over to her. Jackson has had a huge crush on Ilsa and he’s excited; he finally has his shot with his dream woman. But then we cut back to Ilsa and she’s making out with another dude. We then see Jackson falling into a black abyss. This intense feeling of pain from being spurned by someone you have extremely strong feelings for really got to me, as someone who has been spurned on many a occasion. The shot of him falling has really stuck in my brain ever since I saw it, so it kind of made it’s way into the design idea I had. A guy falling in darkness felt like a cool abstract image for a book to me!
The Street Wolves Cover
While I have diverged from the cover of both Street Wolves and the Jumpstart, there’s one thing that carried over: Scorpion. He’s the dude on the cover of Street Wolves: Turbo Edition holding the briefcase. I felt like it would be interesting for him to be caught up in this deadly game of espionage, so now he’s falling. And he’s dropped the briefcase!
The Prototype (Mockup)
After I had an idea and example covers I wanted to imitate, I went ahead and mocked up a really rough version using a photo editor.
The process with this is taking images I find from wherever and assembling them to make a composition. Sometimes I alter a few things here and there. In this case, I roughly cut the guys arm and changed it’s angle. I also colored him a shade of red with a filter.
It’s a really, really rough form of photobashing that helps me figure out if I’m going in the right direction. They help give an artist an idea of what they need to illustrate and what I’m going for with the composition. But even if I need to buy assets instead of going to an artist, it also helps seeing the sample assets in action, so I know if I’m safe buying them from a stock site or not.
The Illustration
Once I had the cover idea, I knew I needed a few elements that I couldn’t make using graphic design: The falling guy, the hand, and a missile launching. I sent off the mock up cover to Nataly who got to work on the three elements. After working with her with a bit of back and forth, we finally nailed all three.
The Final Layout
I’m by no means a masterful graphic designer. I feel like I’m pretty good. So far my experience with this sort of thing is moving things around until they feel “right”. You make a thing a little smaller, then a little larger. You place something in one area and then try it another. Overall, it’s a bit like a puzzle.
At this point, you may be wondering what happened to the missile. During the process of putting the cover together it began to feel “too busy.” I could be wrong, but listening to my instincts with these things is usually a good thing, so I took it out.
So here’s a tip for creators on a budget: Just because you paid for some art and it doesn’t work out, you can use it in the future for something else! I’m thinking at some point as I’m doing the layout of the book I can bring the missile back in. It’ll either be on it’s own or placed on some sort of interesting background.
Anyway, when I had something I felt was pretty good, I went into the final phase: Making it kinda dirty. A lot of designs don’t feel right until they have some sort of distress on them. Or textures. Something to make it not look clean. This cover was a good candidate, because if it’s a pulp novel style you feel it has to be at least a little beat up.
And there you have it, the cover to Dead Hand. I hope you like it, I do. Now all that’s left is to create a back cover, my least favorite part!