Wednesday, 10 February 2010

Main Task - Music Magazine Cover Second Draft

This is the second draft of my cover.
I noticed from the comments on the first draft that many people found the yellow/orangey text blurry and therefore hard to read, I thought this strange since in Photoshop the text looked fine. After playing around with it a bit I found that the blurriness was due not to the colour, but instead due to the file format I had uploaded the first draft as. The JPEG format that I had uploaded my first draft as is not a very high quality container; it is usually only used more because of its smaller file size. It is acceptable for things with only images (which is why digital cameras use it as their preferred format) but text is often unclear. PNG is a much better format since, despite having bigger file sizes, it allows for much much higher quality images, especially when text is used. This comic adequately conveys my point. Anyway, for my second draft I uploaded it as a PNG, so people should no longer have a problem with the blurriness of the text.
Now for actual changes. Firstly I removed the extra eye make-up I worked so hard on since despite liking it I received comments that it made it look like there were slugs under Kerry's eyes, or that it looked like she had an eye infection. Although there were other people who said they liked it, I had to admit that it was more than slightly dodgey.
Next I changed some of the artist names on the right hand side, since (as Nathan commented) "Joseph" didn't seem a suitable name, and "Wilmore" sounded too much like the surname name of a Lord. Because the new names I chose were shorter I was able to move the "Plus" section to the right, which meant that the text imposed less on the photo of Kerry.
The final change I made was including one of my album covers, since some people had said the magazine from a distance looked like it could be a women's health magazine, and so I tried to music it up. I thought the Leanne Bell cover was my best one, which is way I chose it to be the one to include. I therefore had to change the text in that section of the cover from Medusa Rider to Leanne Bell, so the album cover would be related (it would be pretty stupid for a music magazine to have a random image on the cover that is not relevant to any of the text). I gave the album cover a white frame and a drop shadow so that it would be clearer against the background image. I also tilted it slightly, so that it looks more interesting and more like something that would be on a real music magazine cover.
I am very happy with this, but am still prepared to make any further changes should the need arise (for example, if a real band called Space Grind tried to file a lawsuit against me and I had to change that particular band name).

2 comments:

Nathan Sundin said...

very nicely done, but i still think you should have used the third album cover :D! awesome excuse for the text colour :p very well researched :) and very well dont on removing the "slug" eye shadow (I never thought it looked like a slug but anyways...) and a much better name instead of Joseph and Wilmore haha :p

Rishan Gamage said...

looking good coalesy ;) i like the brightness at the centre of the picture and how it is dark all around it. Shows the importance of the image of the girl.