The construction of our digi-pak began after we had established as a group what song we were going to produce a music video on and the genre/style of the band. Theoretically the design decisions were all based on the genre of the band seeing as different codes and conventions are used for different genres of music.
Firstly, we decided to title our album ‘Burn Out’ which would feature the song ‘My Medicine’ on it. This is when new media technologies came into use during the construction and research stages of our digi-pak.
By using online fan based sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter I was able to compile different design elements that I would be able to incorporate in our own designs. Initially I had designed a simple logo using the band’s initials DR (Damned Reputation) and placed them in a red circle to represent a flashing red record button to link into our concept of the band filming themselves in the music video.
However, I then decided that I wanted to make the artwork more extravagant. My idea was to place rope in the shape of my initial design and set it on fire whilst photographing the stages of the rope slowly burning out (a basic representation of the album title). I uploaded my images onto the program Adobe Bridge in order to view my images in the same file and decide which were best to edit.
I then opened up Adobe Photoshop CS4, which is image manipulation software, to begin editing my images. I decided to choose an image of the rope burning strongly, and then also an image of the rope nearly burnt out (intending to use the brightly burning image for the front cover. Seeing as I shot my images in RAW it meant that more detail and colour was preserved in the image, resulting in me being able to manipulate the colour to a higher standard.
For my front cover I was not satisfied with how the rope did not make a perfect circle and the ‘DR’ was not very clear. In order to fix this I used the liquefy tool on Photoshop which allows you to distort your image by moving it around to however you please. This was a slightly long process because it involved a lot of tweaking and making sure the circle and lettering was as good as it could be, however I felt that it was important.
Before:
Having edited the shape of the logo and manipulated the colour I wanted to add another component. I decided, again by using the liquefy tool, that I would merge the flames of the image in the center of the logo to create the words ‘Burn Out’. I thought that this might have not turned out as well as it did but I am pleased with the outcome.
After:
Another technique I used on Photoshop was used on the back cover. I decided I wanted the floor I photographed on to cover the entire image, for continuity purposes relating to colour, on the album. So I used the clone tool on Photoshop, which allows you to focus on a single part of the image, clone it, and paste it to another part of the image.
Finally for the back cover text I used the magnetic lasso tool to break up parts of the text and move it around to create a ‘shattered’ effect that I thought would fit in with the genre of the band.
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