Welcome to the Wattpad Block Party - Summer Edition III!
Round SIX of this popular event is coming your way the entire month of August 2017 and it's going to be epic! The invites have started to roll out and everyone from your all time favorite Wa...
Hi everyone! I'm so excited to be a part of the Wattpad Block Party, and for those of you who don't know, I'm Vicky aka TinHoverCarInIce!
On Wattpad, I'm a writer of teen fiction and humor and a vector graphic designer! Off Wattpad, I'm a hardcore Hamilton addict, a Flash binge watcher, and a high school junior.
Now, I hadn't even thought of the words 'cover design' until around a year ago. In the months before I was a fresh Wattpader, here just to read, and somewhere along the way I found myself writing.
Back then I never really realized the importance of having a nice cover, but when I did, oh boy! Things started to get spicy.
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I was all for using Canva (which still holds a dear place in my heart), slapping a font on there, and boom! It's a cover.
Eventually I realized that these covers weren't as good as I wanted them to be. I looked out to the rest of Wattpad and saw 5 other people using the same picture as I was. Crazy, right?
Apparently not.
If you search 'couple' on Pinterest, you'll see some very recognizable photos in the top 100 choices.
And before we continue, I'd like to stress that there is nothing wrong with font slaps! Some people scorn font slaps, but they make some really cool covers if they're for the right books & genres (mainly teen fiction, romance, etc.)!
But when you're looking for a cover that has a girl with purple hair on it, your options become very, very limited. Especially if it's a person of color (I'll spare you all the rant). Which is why we have to turn to other options besides Canva.
At times, the Slytherin in me (although I am a predominant Hufflepuff, show some badger love!) comes out and I can become very ambitious for something better. And this was one of those instances.
I wouldn't stand for having the same cover as other people, and since I very well couldn't go around asking people to use other photos, I had to devise a different solution.
But unfortunately, there aren't many design options for jobless 15-year-old girls with a fear of downloading programs and no previous digital graphic knowledge whatsoever.
That's when I discovered vector graphics.
Somehow, I stumbled across a cover book that was too gorgeous for me to resist clicking on it, and wham! There was a whole book of examples and tutorials for me.
It was a very Jar Jar Binks move for me to not search for cover help through other books or the multimedia clubs on Wattpad, especially when they're both very good resources available, but we'll skim past that for now.
This was @justlyd's book, Cover to Cover, which had some of the prettiest covers I had ever seen, as well as tutorials. It was cover heaven for me!
And better yet, she used a website that was free and didn't require downloading—Pixlr.
I was in a frenzy, worse than Gollum looking for the ring. It was vector, vector, vector for me! And following my watching of those said tutorials, I learned my way through Pixlr through the lovely process of trial and error (mostly error).
