I agree less is more, (up to a point) but for 9 to be a real parody, some details i would've loved to see, were absent.
I will ask you too then: please elaborate?
No problem, and excuse (in advance) the fussiness involved :b
I like sux's picture>layout integration very much, and to be honest, I never thought of that. I'd do this
, instead. And here are the reasons.
1) Fonts. Proportions, character size and shape (I could fit your E in a square and the original E in a rectangle)
2) Lead, or whatever that is called in english. You could play with elements symbols, i put a life symbol for the lulz, and to stick with the theme.
3) Image... that re-scale hurts, the original dragon was very clean at its original size. I selected the whole background and put a lens blur over it, just to give it a more "photojournalistic" look, and a bit of depth of field meanwhile. The dragon itself has an amazing detail and texture, and it's very eye-catching...so no need to touch that. I played with the levels a little, too. (not that it helped much) but it'd save you from sharing half of the award icon with Peps xD let's admit it, the dragon is 80% of the submission.
PS: that highlighted square over its head is my favorite part of it)
4) Yet another nice thing about Pepokish's dragon is that it has a nice structure for you to put info over it. Your submission has text over its body (white text, not very comfortable to read), and the subtitle eats the whole background. Too many things are happening in that corner.
I rearranged the same amount of info just to show you what i mean.
Hope that helped.-
