Photoshop CS5
This is a software that I shall be using in most of the designing stages of the CD cover artwork, Band homepage design layout, and promotional uses. I’ve decided to use Adobe Photoshop CS5 instead of Illustrator as im more familiar with this software, and its complex enough to give us the ability to experiment with different photo manipulation effects.
I will be mainly using photoshop CS5 for photo editing only as this is the better software for the job. Whereas, for getting the text and layouts correctly aligned I shall be using Adobe Indesign CS5 as this software is based mainly on layout design.
InDesign CS5
To begin with we opened InDesign package software, the first thing we would need to do before we can do anything is measure the CD cover compartments accurately and get the Photoshop page layout exactly to size, making sure all dimensions have been fitted and measured correctly. We need to do this because when it comes to getting the CD external and internal surfaces printed out commercially we need to make sure we go through quality control and testing using printing marks, etc.
Below is a screen shot of the blank document that will be the basic template to guide us when we are designing.
I’ve measured up each dimension of the front cover and attempted to get it done accurately. As you can tell from this screen shot it is immediately beginning to look like the shape of a CD cover, and its clear to see where the images and texts are allowed to go and where it shouldn’t placed.
Design Ideas for Front cover:
Design 1:
This is design 1, my first attempt to create an Album cover which relates to our song perfectly. I found some images over the Internet and used Photoshop to merge the three images together, to create a meaningful design. I used a very bright colour font which stands out the most in this design and the font is very complex compared to the design, which made the overall impact look unbalanced. I also think that the empty room should blend in more with the brain/mind, otherwise it will look badly photoshop and therefore doesn’t give a very professional appearance.
Design 2:
This design is personally one of my favorite designs which I developed from the first design. I still used the same three images but used different editing techniques to manipulate the image. I used different opacity levels and fill levels to make the empty room more merged in the brain. Then I decided to use a dark human figure that appears to be trying to escape, so help it match the character in our music video. I wanted to use a simple font that would look really effective against the image “GTD” was the name of the font that I’ve found which had really interesting shapes and symbols to make up the words. I decided to try this font but using capitals which make the symbols turn into readable typography.
Design 3:
This design is very busy compared to the simplicity of the other designs. However I do like this design as it symbolised the fact that the album is about being trapped in an artisitic layout. I really like the way i’ve used the shaded hands on both edges of the album cover as this could represent a person trapped behind the CD case. Or it could have more meaning to it as the hands can signify the music industry of a working day life trapped in this hetic lifestyle that a celebrity has to face every single day and there is no escape from the paparazzi’s. Therefore the faded hands could somehow represent Kid Cudi trapped in a working day lifestlye which can eventually become his album being published.
Design 4:
Again the same hands are used in this design as myself and my group think it looks extremely effective. However this design doesnt say as much when it comes to the mind situation. Its basically an empty room with a broken sofa and a window which only symbolised the room that kid Cudi is trapped in within the video. But from the first impression of this design i dont feel it has as much meaning towards it than it does in the other designs.
Design Ideas for Back cover:
When it comes to designing the back cover, I find it personally hard to mess around with the page and text layout as music singles tend to only have 1-3 songs on the back which wastes a lot of space. Therefore throughout the designing process of the back cover, we will need to find different solutions to cover the whole page to make it more eye-catching and visual appealing.
Design 1:
On this design I’ve tried to make it look consistent to the designs I’ve created for the front cover. So from using some inspiration from the front cover designs, I thought it would be a good idea to incorporate some of it towards the back cover. We have decided to use the same images from the front cover and duplicated a few images to use more of the page up.
Design Ideas for Booklet:
Exterior
Design 1: This is a design that I randomly came up with from using the potential previous designs combined together. This is the exterior design of the CD booklet:
Interior
Design 1: This is one of the first designs that came into mind when thinking how to design an interior information page as simple as possible.
I really wanted to keep the inside simple but effective from the use of lines, colours and sharpness of the layout. I felt that less was really more in this situation. I really like the straight line which represents an heard beat rate, as I felt this could be incorporated well with the idea of being trapped in his own mind, which makes him crazy, possibly suicidal. We thought we could include some shots that will represent that, for example walking into the light to death.
Rachel Louise Taylor 