Album Cover - From start to Finish

Starting the Album Cover:

For designing the album cover we were given three separate links to help us choose and create a random fictional album cover. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Random

http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

https://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

We were asked to use Wikipedia Random Article to select the name for our fictional band, once clicking random article in wiki we then used the title of the article as our bands name I was give 'Boulevard' which ended up working quite well for my album cover. 

The song title or title for the album cover was then chosen by using quotations page and by selecting the last four or five words, from the very last quote at the bottom of the page. I was given the title of "Work a little harder" which I thought to be quite ironic once I had found my image for the album cover.

For the image for the album cover we used flickr and had to choose the last image of the first line. This was the image before I edited it into the an album cover, the picture is of an office building purely made of these glass windows and a poor man who has been given the awful duty of cleaning the windows.

Creating the Album Cover:

Now that I had everything I needed to create the album cover I started production on it, creating and editing the images and placing everything. 

So I first started by editing the image itself before adding on any information such as the band name and title of the fictional album.

Starting Image 

Editing Image 1


I first started by selecting just the building and then inverting the selected area to selecting the sky, my idea was to try and make the colour of the sky a darker blue so it adds a burst of colour to image rather than just keeping it black and white. 

Sky Edit Image 2

This image shows the sky full edited, I used the curves tool on Photoshop to create this image. By lowering the curve point it means that it darkens the sky and keeps the clouds the bright white colour, rather than filling in the section with the paint bucket and editing the opacity and fill percentage, this would have made the sky just blue rather than keeping the detail of the clouds and the sky.

However once I had finished editing the image like this I decided that it didn't work well like this and decided to scrap this idea and try a different route on editing this image.

Contrast and Brightness Image Editing

After scraping the blue sky idea, I decided it would be best to the image in black and white because of the intricate design of the building, the focus was taken away from the building and focused peoples attention more towards to sky.

However I did then decide I wanted to emphasis the features of this building so I edited the image into black and white, and then changed the contrast and brightness.

By changing the contrast on the image it emphasised the metal structure of the windows and highlighted the amazing design of the buildings windows. I did decide that I would leave the brightness as it was as by changing this didn't make to much of a difference to the image.

Typography Edit:

Red Typography

Once the image had finally been finished and edited to a standard that I was happy with I started adding the typography. I added the album title and and the band name.

This version of the album cover I kept the font in a large bold font and filled the colour with a deep red colour, I felt that the red colour was the only colour that was able to stand out more against the black and white image. I had also decided to use the guideline on Photoshop to help try and place the font in a more creative way and give it a more interesting appearance.

I did however decide that it would be creative to put the text on its side (Boulevard: Band Name)  and then by adding the title of the album by fitting in between the the 'L' in the 'Boulevard' band name title. I also kept the text in white. I did however decide that this didn't look right at the time so decided to edit it again.

Edited Typography White Boulevard

So for this example of edited work I decided that there wasn't a colour that was clear enough to see the text clearly and properly. So I decided to add a rectangle block of colour this then made it easier to see the text on the photo album. I decided to keep the colour scheme black and white, so I put both bits of text in white and make the text bold. 

I then decided that the text needed to add something else, I felt that the text looked too plain and uncreative. So I edited the text again. 

Black and White Gradient Effect

Here we finally see a part of the finished album cover, I added a gradient black and white filter effect to the Boulevard test this I felt this broke up all the solid colour up and made the text look much more enticing and visually pleasing. I did as well change the length of the black box and slimmed it down to make it look less chunky, however in the final image I did make the box look larger.

FINAL PRODUCT:

This is the final album cover design for the 'Boulevard' the fictional band, I feel that there are some more things that I could have edited and finished however I decided that I did in fact like the rough edges that the image has. I personally like the image as it and feel like its a professional piece.