Task 11: First Draft Of Print Products

First Draft Of Print Products

After we finished editing, we began on our print products. We started by looking through photos/videos we had of Jess (the artist) from when we filmed which we discovered a photo of her walking down a path with the back to the camera. We liked this shot and thought it would be good on the album as it is helps brand her as an artist, as she is wearing the hat, coat and heels which is her signature style. 

We began by going on photo shop and cropping out the background of the shot of her walking away because we didn't want the cover to reflect the music video only, as it is in album cover and not a single cover. As we was focusing on the front cover first we inserted the picture in order to add titles. We then picked out a font that was quite simple however to allow it to stand out we added a shadow to give it more depth and allow it to pop out of the page instead of having it flat to the image.

 We chose to have the background grey because the songs on the album are more slower and emotional songs rather than up tempo songs, so we thought a darker shade would look most effective. The photo of Jess on its own in colour did not suit the style of the rest of the cover as it didn't go with the grey tones. Initially we didn't know where we was going to place to cropped picture of Jess however after playing around with some effects we managed to find a structure which we liked. We duplicated the picture so there was three of them in total then placed them next to each other in a horizontal line across the front CD cover. We then tried to put the photos in black and white, but it looked too plain and clashed with the background. We then adjusted the transparency in all three images of Jess and made them slowly fade, like a ombre effect, across the page to made it look like shes slowly fading away.

We then started on the back cover. We found a medium close up shot of Jess we took while filming which we really liked because it also helped brand the artist. This shot is similar to the one we drew in our hand-drawn draft of our CD cover however we decided to put this photo in black and white effect to blend it with the front cover. We used the same text font as we did for the front cover, although this does not stand out as much as the writing is a lot smaller although we did put a thin shadow around it.

Also on the back we used a barcode and our production company name as that is what is included on a real album back cover, along with small print at the bottom about copyright issues etc. We decided to have our song list going horizontally to stick with the theme of horizontal lines.

We then decided we were going to create more drafts of the covers and then get audience feedback on them. We started by creating another cover that swapped around the front and back from our previous design. When this was finished we actually preferred this designed, as in the previous design the front cover looked quite bare and plain where as with the picture of Jess on the front it stands out more. Also on the back cover due to the song list, there isn't much of a background needed so the 3 outlines fitted well here and on the previous cover the words got lost into the picture of Jess due to the variety of tones on her outfit and the trees where as in the new one they stand out. Therefore we decided the cover below was our favorite out of the two.