Production of Front Cover

The front cover of my CD was designed after looking at the codes and conventions analysed earlier on in this project. Looking at the five covers, it seemed to me that there were various things which needed to be taken forwards:

• Colour - Something vibrant to draw in the public



• Imagery - A well taken image which will give the public something to think about.



• Text - A larger font for the artist name rather than the album title.

With these Codes and Conventions in mind I can now set about designing my front cover. I drafted up a number of ideas (shown in previous posts), however from these I decided upon the 'Andy Warhol' style cover, with four quadrants filled with vibrant colours and a separate image with the character looking in different directions.

I have taken inspiration from the Pink Floyd album cover, and how it can be manipulated into different products (a restaurant, for example). With this in mind, I have decided to play on the Andy Warhol theme.

Firstly, I opened a Photoshop Document and resized the page to 12 cm x 12 cm; the standard size of a CD. After doing so, I divided the page into quadrant, each 6 x 6 cm wide so that they fit together and took the whole page:

So, from this base I can now go on and add the images. I took four original photos (shown on earlier posts) and these will be the images I will use. Using the magnetic lassoo tool, I cropped around the head of the character and transferred it onto this background. Once I had done this with all four, I went around individual aspects of the character - being his hair and shoulder. Using the 'Bevel and Emboss', 'Satin' and 'Gradient Overlay' effects, this altered the way they looked completely, and therefore made the character more eye catching. It also added more emphasis to the colour on the front page as this, I feel, is the most important code and convention. Once all four were in place, the page looked like this:

All that was left now was to insert the name of the artist and album. I decided upon a central placing due to the positioning of the heads; everywhere else would have made the font too difficult to read. I also decided that the separation of the quadrants acted as a good line to rest the text on. As I saw with the codes and conventions, the album name is smaller than the artist name, and so this is how the text looked before alteration:

With the font looking like this, I decided that it did not jump off the page, it did not attract the public and was difficult to read clearly. To combat these problems, I used the 'Bevel and Emboss' text effect, which manipulated the text to look like this:

As you can see, the text stands out much more with this new outline, and therefore I feel that this front cover is finished:

Looking back to the codes and conventions stated earlier, I feel that I have adhered to all of them:

• Colour - The four quadrants (red, purple, green and blue) stand out from any other album cover which may be on a shelf. The colours are those that are able to be seen from a long distance and therefore more copies are likely to be sold.


• Text - The name of the band appears in much larger text than the album title. It is also more centrally aligned.


• Imagery - The use of four images have worked well. I believe that using that same character keeps continuity which I feel is important. The character is also the main character in my main task, the music video and therefore the public can relate this album cover to the video.

Here is a short video outlining some of the key productions parts of my front cover: