23.8. Cover art

| Chapter 23: Releasing |

| 23.8. Cover art

Accompanying files are not the only things which can be included in a "release along with" sentence: for instance, we could

> Release along with cover art, a file of "Collegio magazine" called "Collegio.pdf" and a file of "The mating call of the green wyvern" called "Mating Wyverns.mp3".

Cover art can not only be used to advertise a work of IF, it is also displayed to players by certain interpreters, such as Zoom or Spatterlight for OS X, or Windows Frotz for Windows. It is also used on the IFDB (ifdb.tads.org), and by browsing applications. If Zoom is installed, then on Mac OS X Leopard, the Finder shows cover art directly:

Cover art for a work should be prepared in either JPEG (".jpg") or PNG (".png") format, and we recommend that it should be square, like a music album cover. Programs which notice the cover art for a work of IF are likely to scale this up or down as convenient for their own display purposes, but it would be helpful to provide the original art at 960 by 960 resolution. (Remember, it is intended for use on screen, so providing art at magazine full-page print quality will add nothing and will only make the resulting release an annoyingly large download: even as it is, 960x960 will print out as a pretty respectable CD insert sleeve.) The cover art must not be smaller than 120 pixels in either dimension.

To provide cover art, we should create two files: Cover.jpg (or .png), and a reduction of the image to a smaller "thumbnail" version called Small Cover.jpg (or .png). These should be placed in the project's Materials folder. For instance, we might have:

> Works in Progress
> Magician Materials
> Collegio.pdf
> Cover.jpg
> Mating Wyverns.mp3
> Small Cover.jpg
> Magician.inform

(supposing that, as in the previous examples, "Collegio.pdf" and "Mating Wyverns.mp3" are the filenames of two feelies that accompany the release). "Small Cover.jpg" should be a reduction of the main cover art image "Cover.jpg" to exactly 120 by 120 pixels.

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