notdanmartin
2026
1
1
I standardized layers effects to lift the blacks in the images and soften the contrast so the covers felt faded, like the lustre of the print left decades ago. Textures put it over the top, both in ground- in dirt, mildew (black), and wear/tear to show the color of the underlying paper stock (beige).
I put a bunch of spreads together, but this one is my favorite. The postcard/key art for these locations is excellent, and works beautifully for this art-first approach to organizing the lore.
The books of sorrow are incredible. I imagined some sort of unlock animation, though I hadn't had the chance to build it when I made these screen recordings. I wanted to do a ink/etching style illustration for each of the books of sorrow in that empty left pane- I thought that would have been a nice companion to the entries (and terrible for performance).
I went through SO many iterations and layouts. it was hard to decide where to leave space for upcoming content and where to let it "cap".
I ran a similar filter (lifting blacks, reducing contrast) on screenshots of characters, but I also ran a light (2%) gaussian blur on the screenshots to reduce artifacting, soften edges, and then add 2% monochromatic noise on a separate layer set to overlay.
So much has changed since I put this together in the lore. Might be fun to rebuild this to current content.
