"Bad Blood" teaser poster

this is a really nice design, thanks for posting it- good luck with the project

Personally I find the font hard to read, I read it as "Dad Bload" quite clearly. the only reason I knew it was bad blood was because of your title and the blood splatters around kinda made me think it was suppose to be blood.

I would work on making it a little clearer what it actually says. That second "o" is just killing me as it looks like an a.

Also I'm having a hard time understanding the background picture. Is it an old west ghost town? A House? What exactly is that? The contrast is almost too strong with the black and red and it just makes it very hard to see/understand.

Lastly, the only thing I really notice is the skulls, in fact, I notice them more then the book title itself. I understand they are next to the title and lead your eyes to it, but I just think the title should be a little more prominent then the skulls in this case. Especially since the skulls seem a little out of place imo. The background picture/font look "realistic" where as the skulls look like a cartoon vector. It just doesn't match to me.

Anyway overall I like the idea and concept, just think it could use some tweaking.

Maybe if the skulls were red they'd look like they belonged in this poster? Right now they look like an afterthought.

I agree with T on the font issues. The tagline is way too small. Will this teaser be a poster? If so, take legibility into account; it should be legible from across a room (at least 15', I'd say).

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i have reduced the contrast in the skulls and tweaked the font. I also added a new tag and some glowing lanterns for atmosphere. The whole image is vector based...

Or "blood space" in this case - I think the overall balance of the design is good, but I'd personally allow more white space with the tagline... just don't like how it's filling the top of the cover.

Of course, this might go completely against nat's suggestion to keep things legible if viewed at 15' away...

I agree, too, the skulls could at least use a bit of a red tinge to them. Make them look blood-spattered maybe? (Maybe not - might make them too busy... but they need something.)

Very cool that's all vector.

Or maybe make those lanterns a white glow instead of the yellow-ish glow. That could give you more of an "excuse" to have those white-ish skulls in there... In saying that, I mean you're bringing more of the white to other places... play with it - could turn out to be an awful idea, though, because the "line" the create doesn't quite play well with the rest of the layout.

This is what I came up with:

- Axe the tagline text entirely from the top.
- Move the building images up the page more until a nice balance is achieved, increasing the black space between the buildings and the skulls
- Nudge "bad blood" up so it's coming a little closer to that top right skull
- In the light-grey color sampled from the frontmost skull, place the tagline text under "bad blood" - Maybe stagger the lines a bit so they're not flush left. Center under "bad blood". This will decrease the size of the text from what you're using at the top. You might want to play with the color some more, though - not sure the light grey is what you're going to want.
- Change the lanterns from the glowing yellow to a glowing red.