It would be great if there was a place where cover artists could upload the individual assets they used to make a cover. I have often been looking at covers and thought "Where did they get such a high resolution version of that logo/character/cover/art?" or "They did a great job cropping out the background of that logo. I wish I could use it it on my box." But, usually the asset in question has has been partially covered by a logo/ratting/etc. or I do not possess the skills to be able to lift the asset off the cover. It would be great if the assets could be posted so everyone doesn't have to go through the same work of finding/cropping assets over and over again. Plus, those with less skill (like myself) would be able to create higher quality covers.
Things that would be great to share:
High resolution/quality images, covers, logos, etc., especially ones with transparent backgrounds. Sometimes these can be very difficult to find. Even just a link to where you found it would be great.
Logos, characters, etc. that you lifted. A lot of us can't knock out the background logos and such. If you can, and did, please share it! Even if you thought it was trivial.
Touched up scans and covers. If you spent the time to make a scan look great, or you were able to hide baked-in logos and ratings on covers, please share! Often what would be a great cover is unusable because of a large USK rating when I need ESRB.
Bare covers. If you can share a copy of your cover with no ratings, no banner, or even no extra added logos, please do. This allows others who may want to use a different rating system or banner to do so without having to try and remove the one you chose (some banners/ratings are larger than others and can't be simply covered up). Its always much easier to add that stuff that it is to try and remove it (especially if you share those assets ).
Custom assets. Did you design or build a horizontal version of a game's logo/title for the spine? I bet others would love to use it as well.
Fonts. A link or just the name would be great. Sometimes fonts are very difficult to identify even with font identifier websites.
PSDs. This would be amazing and I think the easiest way to share assets. But, I know they can get quite large (100mb+).
@yo1dog, you've got some great ideas. I've been thinking for a while of adding a "resources" tab to the top of the menu with some of the content you mentioned. There are multiple problems on our end with doing that. One is just organizing all of the different types of content people would upload. Also sifting/approving it would be a nightmare on my end. Finally just the space required might increase our server costs.
I think we might eventually add some of the content you mentioned in the forum of external site links. We'll see.
I'm a big believer in open source (software engineer), and having now started to publish my own covers I've decided to store the PSD files on my Google Drive for anyone to download. Linked in my file description.
I've included the original assets in their own folder in the PSD, and then labelled everything up so anyone can see how the finished result came to be.
This website is a fantastic resource, and those art assets, like OP said, could be invaluable to someone else.
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