Any advice on my bookmarks?
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Hey! guys just needed some critiques on my bookmarks any advice would be great!!!!
Witch one would you buy and why would you buy it?
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Graphically I think the sunset one is the strongest here. The gradient in the sky reads well and the water reads well. It comes across as the most finished of the bunch. So if I was to buy one, it would be that one.
I do have thoughts on the others, so please take these as you want. I'm throwing a lot out there to you but it's not to bring you down, just hopefully to make you think a bit.
I do know designing bookmarks can sometimes be tricker than it seems. I enjoy doing it from time to time for my own personal use.Mostly the improvements I see here all come down to design. Graphic design isn't easy but it's worth digging into, it will improve everything from how you lay something like this out, the fonts you choose and even how you illustrate.
First off, I think the text on each of these needs some work. I'm not a graphic design expert and even less of an expert on text design but I have done a bit of work here and there and these I think could be a lot stronger in terms of what font you're choosing to use and how you're using it within the design. For example the "Live The Adventure" one doesn't come off as that adventurous. I would explore some of the free font websites out there and find something that looks a bit more exciting, think of the Indiana Jones font for example, not that you should use that one, but how it's used and laid out. It feels like action and excitement.
Or for the Taxi one, there are some great graphic ques that go with Taxies that could be incorporated with the font, just google Taxi Fonts or anything like that to get some ideas.
The, Whale?, eating a Bee one could also use some help I think. It's a little dull and I couldn't figure out what it was trying to eat for a bit. But once again the text could complement the motion of the image more by making it sort of swoop upwards following the larger creature, with a bit of an arc to it. Now, that may also be a limitation on whatever software you're using, not every software gives you that much control over the font so I completely understand if you couldn't do that. But it's something to think about.
All in all, the fonts are also kind of squeezed together on this making them a bit difficult to read. It feels like you're doing that to keep the font as large as possible but still fitting on the bookmark. If that's the case you have to ask yourself what is more important, the font working and reading well, or just squeezing it on as big as you can? I say this because I used to do this all the time, Haha. I wanted the font to be as LARGE and readable as possible and would try and cram it all together to get that size. But in the end I think it's just doing it a disservice.
Also, and this is just a personal preference, but I'm not really feeling the kind of muddy brownish backgrounds on the Taxi and Adventure ones. For one, it just feels very digital looking, but that's also me, I've been digitally painting since the late 90's so some textures just stand out to me. But I also don't think the color or texture is adding to your image. I would almost think they would look cleaner as just white. That's why I love the sunset one the most, because it feels right, it's more pleasing to my eyes.
To cap this off though, really, the important thing here, and the cool thing, is that you're making stuff, you're trying to make bookmarks, and it sounds like you want to make them and sell them, and that's awesome. Go for it!
And I do enjoy your drawings on them, I have nothing to add to those, just design stuff. Which, is always tricky. Keep at it! -
@Malachi-Hudelson I definitely like the taxi one best (I like the comical gesture of the vehicle), but I would take away the brown and texture, just make the background white and add a question mark to the end of the sentence instead of a period.
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To me it might just be a color space issue, but they look quite dark if you were to put them inside a book, especially the second and the third one
To me all of them works pretty well graphically. But personally I'm not a bookmark type of person, so I have no idea what to prefer or expect 
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The taxi should have a question mark
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THANKS!!!
