Thanks to Black Squirrel on Sonic Retro, some of Sega's official PAL coverart guidelines have been posted online, and I took a deep dive into them to see if I could create a usable template from them. As it turns out, even the guidelines are inconsistent, with layouts, colours and text formatting varying from what we actually saw on shelves! No wonder the cases in production were so varied.
All this having been said, I've created some PAL Dreamcast coverart and discart templates in Photoshop, which attempt to reconcile Sega's official guidelines with some of the more consistent final designs that were released. These templates feature a great deal of the iconography seen on official cases as pulled from the Sega guidelines and beyond - everything down to peripheral icons, age ratings for various regions, and the correct fonts for all standard text.
There are a couple of caveats to bear in mind when using these templates:
- The famous shade of blue is defined by Sega as Pantone 660CV, and this can appear very different depending upon the colour space used. As such, it is represented in RGB, CMYK, Pantone, an average of the preceding three values, and as represented on the official guideline documents, for you to choose from. Personally, I consider the CMYK version to be closest to a number of official titles I own.
- Placement of certain elements, particularly the spine logos and text and the front cover logos, varies a lot across the PAL library. The placements seen in these templates again tries to reconcile these to be as cohesive as possible with most PAL titles.
The attached zip includes templates for front and back covers and disc, as well as the original materials used to create these templates, in case you wish to make adjustments to them. Hopefully everything is labelled clearly enough for maximum usability. Enjoy creating!