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17 February 2014
Well it's not so much of a crisis more a minor panic.

Actually it's not so much of a minor panic as a bit of a worry.

Okay it's not so much of  minor worry but.....alright you get the picture.  

In reality this blog post isn't about any kind of crisis it's all about my web identity.  It's all about the branding of me.  No not the red hot metal type the corporate type.

The branding of me:  


You see if I'm to become the world's best selling author (hey if you going to have a goal you may as well make it a big one) I really need people to 'buy into' me as a brand.  In order to do that there are plenty of things I can do.  A lot of which involves social networking.

But from a wider perspective.  If someone encounters one of my works and then visits my website it would be nice if there was instant recognition.  Alternatively if someone had been to my website and caught site of one of my books again if that instant recognition was there then my branding efforts are working.

Companies like Coca Cola, Cadbury and Walkers all have their own font and logo for precisely this reason.  (You have to love my list of unhealthy examples)  

So to this end this weekend I have been playing with Fonts.  Just trying to see what I can make work.  

I had in my mind a gold bordered font where I can change the colour of the letters but the font is still recognisable.

So I started out by finding  http://cooltext.com/ on Google.  Then I switched to their Gold Trim option.

From there I just had a look at the Top 100 fonts and settled for using Dark Crystal.

I started out with just my name and after some editing in Pixlr Editor ended up with the following:


I made a version of this with a white background that you can see above.  I even made a version with a Transparent background you can see on my twitter account.

I then repeated the process but this time with the website for the forthcoming novel George And The Dragon.   



There are parts of this I really like and parts I dislike.  I'm not totally happy with the font although it really highlights what I was after as a concept.  I do really like the way the capitals stand out so you can really read the URL it doesn't all merge into some unreadable block of text.

Next I decided to combine the two.  I've actually used this on my Facebook page to see what it would look like.  It's not bad, that's for sure, but it's not perfect either.



At this point I was happy with my results so I tried the same process but with different book titles I have on the burner and different colours.   The first book I tried was a YA novel I've written as part of this years NaNoWriMo titled "Wynter Unending". I tried it with a couple of different shades of light blue but wasn't happy with any of them.


However, I was happier using a two colour pattern for "Nicholas North - Schoolboy Detective".  These aren't definitive colours more of a proof of concept.  But it definitely has potential.



So now I have to go away and have good search through the millions of fonts available on-line to see if I can find one that I'm happy with.  Alternatively I may end up having to have my own font produced for me.

As an aside I also managed to find the best point to work the funeral into the book so one step closer to completion. 






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