Wednesday, 7 March 2012

Creating the back cover for the album

We decided to stick with the original layout that we previously made because it conformed to the typical conventions of the back of an album. We made sure to include everything need for the back of the album; song titles, spine, bar code, institutional information and the logo of the record company. We choose to have a simple font for the typography so that it could easily be read. 
The main thing we changed was the main image of the album. We decided to choose this image because the medium close up frame clearly shows the artists for the audience to recongnise. We also thought the pose was effective because the lead singer is the only one looking directly at the camera which catches audiences attention as it seem like he is watching them. We directed them to pose in this way in order to catch the audiences attention, we choose Jordan to look directly at the camera because he's the lead singer and would therefore be the most well know member in the band as a result fans will be more familiar with him. This pose was inspired by images that the Arctic Monkeys used in their albums. 

One of the problems that we faced was the image being too small, we could not stretch out the photo to fit the whole background because the song titles would overlapped the two of the band members, making the album look unprofessional. In order to avoid this we cropped a section of the background from another photo and added it to the image we had chosen.


We decided to blur the background so that it would look as one, rather then two separate images. The brightness and contrast of the image was also lowered so that the bright colours would be more outstanding.  Having the background blurry also makes the setting more mysterious, as the location we choose did not connote anything interesting that went with the theme of the album or name.
We then made the spines of the CD more clear by making them black. We also changed the colour scheme from white, yellow, blue and orange to yellow, blue and red because they are primary colours and therefore most commonly used. They are also bright and eye-catching colours making the ablum appeal more to the audience. We also chose these colours because we wanted the album to look colourful as the name of the band is 'The Colours'. We also changed the coulours so that they would stand out against the background because the previous white colour used for the song titles did not stand out.  We made a conscious choice to have the track numbers and song titles different colours so that it would be easier for the audience to read and trace whatever song they wanted to listen to.


Because the album is called Canvas we wanted to give the image an effect so that it would look like it had been painted onto a canvas. I firstly thought of having an image of a canvas at the back of the image of the band. I then slightly faded the image of the band so that the texture of the canvas would show through the band photo. However we decided that this was not effective because the image did not stand out as much after it was faded out. We showed the image to a group of people and asked if the image looked like it had been painted onto a canvas. The general response was that the texture did look like a painted canvas but the image should be brighter therefore we changed it again. 

Another idea we had was to have the background of the image cut out so that the canvas can clearly be seen. Although this made the typography stand out, the final product did not look finished. It was also very difficult to get the edges of the image to bled in with the image of the canvas. The rough edges made the album look unprofessional. 


We finally thought to change the texture of the image. We added a craquelure texture and played around with he spacing, depth and brightness of the cracks until we were sure that the image had a painted effect. 

We changed the logo of the record company so that i would look more unique compared to the rest of the typography. We choose to merge the first letters of our group members names and came up with the name RSN Records for the record label name. We choose the Rosewood Std font because its bold and different from the rest of the typography. We added a black stroke to the font to make it stand out even more.

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