Before I start please know I AM NOT POINTING THE FINGER AT ANYONE! I'm not trying to throw shade at some old requester by being all passive-aggressive about things. Just to clear that up. :)

So anyways, it really makes me sad when my old requesters change their covers. Wow, how selfish, you must be thinking. They can do what they want with their graphics, it's their book. And I absolutely agree with you there.

The thing is, I've seen a lot of my old requesters change their covers to stuff I think is sub-par to what I made them. I totally understand if they like it better, that's not the problem. But when you have one of my newer, pretty nice Photoshop covers compared to something that looks like it was made in Phonto, it kind of bums me out.

I spend a long time making covers. Like, a goddang long time. A shit ton. I haven't had Photoshop terribly long, and I'm an awful perfectionist, so covers can take me any time from two hours to days. As a student two hours is an enormous chunk of my time, and I'm balancing the hardest courses I've ever taken along with extracurriculars and other stuff.

I never give anyone a cover I wouldn't use for my own book. (Except for those crappy Phonto covers in the olden days. We don't speak of those.) So when a requester's covers get downgraded it frustrates me a little bit.

There's a 'return policy' on my covers for a reason - I want to make sure you love the cover and am always ready to change it if there's anything that needs to be fixed. If a requester doesn't like a cover so much so that they don't ever use it / change it to something else, I'm disappointed with myself. I wasn't able to give them what they wanted, and I feel like I failed on my side as the designer.

All this to say, I'm closing cover studio for now, maybe for good. Between the enormous time loss I have with classes and stuff I just don't have time for graphics anymore. I've come to understand that some people don't value my work as much as I do, and that's okay. I'll start joining some contests again, but my cover-making days are on hiatus for now.

As an afterthought, if you're reading this and I've made a cover for you please don't feel obligated to change it back! I just wanted to express how I felt. So don't feel guilty or anything if you feel like this applies to you somehow - it is your book, after all! :)

Fin.