My CD Cover Designs

As stated in my last post, I had decided to design some CD covers which I may be able to use on either my contents page or double page spread, or even on a later draft of my front cover. I came up with the three covers posted below which I made in Adobe Photoshop, but before condemning them please consider that I was trying to experiment and I am likely only going to be using one of them, or two at the most.

The first cover I did by using the magic wand tool with different tolerance levels to cut out the girl from the background. I removed the colour from the picture and then applied a rainbow gradient effect at 50%, so that it overlaid the background and the picture of the girl but so that the picture was still clearly visible. The reason for applying these effects was because I named the album "Not Always Black and White", and placing a rainbow colour scheme over a desaturated girl is obviously relevant to such a title.
 
For the second cover I applied some slight lighting effects, but went for a much simpler design overall. I didn't feel that anything would be gained by using snazzy effects, and so left the photo pretty much as it was (though cropped down of course). I used a white font as it mainly went over the girl's black hair and white is clearly visible on black. I used the font Harrington as it looks elegant and sophisticated, and the photo seems more in fitting with this. I noticed from the album covers research that the band/artist name is usually much larger than the album title, and I took this into account and applied it myself.

For the third and final cover I cropped the photo, but then decided the picture looked a bit boring by itself. I began to experiment with the different filters in the Filter Gallery until I found one that made the image look more exciting, but still suitable for an album cover. I eventually found and applied a filter called dark strokes, which made the image darker and blurrier (but in a good way) and gave the image an overall gothic feel. I'm not too happy with the background, font or album title, but this particular cover was meant mainly to test out different image effects. One interesting thing I did do to the text was to position each letter of "DEAD" individually and apply a tilt to each one. I personally quite like the slightly comical effect it gave, but whether it was suitable for the image I'm not too sure.

CD Cover Research

I decided that I would try and make one or two CD album covers to put on either my contents page or double-page spread. I thought it would be an effective way to add more factors to my magazine to emphasise its musical-ness. The following are covers which I collected off the internet and thought to be relevant. I particularly looked at covers showing the faces of females, as most of my photos are of girls' faces.

Magazine Photos - Third Attempt

For my third attempt at photo-taking I decided to take pictures of each of the three girls form the last photo-shoot by themselves. This way I could incorporate the last set of pictures with any I took this time, since I felt I didn't have enough good shots to use on a front page, contents and double-page spread. I mainly did medium close-up shots, as I decided that this was what I wanted to do for my cover. Also, I applied some effects to certain photos, since I have been experimenting more in Photoshop lately. Here is a selection of the photos:

 

 

 

Magazine Photos - Second Attempt

The following photos are, as one could deduce from the title, my second attempt at taking photos for the music magazine. Like last time I am only including a selection, since there were some that were either extremely similar or extremely bad.
And now, the differences in this set of pictures from the last. Firstly: I used girls. I did this because I had access (bad choice of words) to girls who looked a lot more mature and therefore better suited to be in a band, as opposed to my friends who do just look like teenagers messing about. Also these girls are more attractive than my friends, which means that the potential audience of my magazine will like them more and also I'll have less work to do on Photoshop. Another major thing that I changed was the setting; previously I had gone for the garage band look but this time I used a white background which gave the whole thing a more professional feel. The clothes the girls were wearing were better than before, but still not really perfect. They looked very good and cool individually, but had little coordination all together.

Magazine Photos - First Attempt

Below are photos taken from the first set of pictures I took to possibly include in my magazine. I organised after school one day to gather three of my friends at another friend's house. I asked them to bring their own clothes, ones which would give the impression of them being in a band, and I got them to do a variety of different poses in my friend's garage. In the first few pictures everyone is still wearing their suits, as I thought it would be interesting to experiment with more than one set of costumes. In some shots they are holding/using instruments, in others not.
Overall these pictures didn't turn out all that well, though that should be forgiven as this was my first try. The main reason for my failure is probably the setting, since a garage (despite the popularity of garage bands) is probably not the best place to take photos for a professional music magazine. Another problem is likely that that friends I used didn't look enough like they were in a band. One of them (Jonny - the boy with glasses and a hat) looked actually quite suited to be a musician; the other two did not. Also a problem was that their clothes weren't really coordinated enough, so even if each of them looked like rock stars they wouldn't have looked like they were in a group. I tried to take all these factors on board and improve on them when taking my next set of photos.
Also, please forgive the somewhat deranged layout of the photos; Blogger makes it exceedingly difficult to post multiple pictures in any sort of sensible order.