Production of Ancillary products: Creating my digipak part 3

I added the artists website and also the record labels website on my back panel which would help advertise the artist more.

I then changed the positioning of the website to make the artists website stand out more which is why it is also yellow.

I still believed that my back panel looked to plain so I then looked at other others pack panels to see if they have done any different then me...

Here are some of the back panels I looked at..

As you can see most back panels that are in the same or similar genre as me have some kinda of design or image in the background. After viewing these back panels I've decided to make a design on my back panel.

Getting started on my advertisement!

Production of ancillary work

I have finally started my advertisement! And I have closely stuck by my original rough cut sketch of my advertisement (below is the image).

As you see I have used the same theme that I used for my digipak. I have used the same fonts, and font colours so that there is a link between the advertisement and my digipak. I have included the same image that is on the front of the digipak on the left hand side of my advertisement, and included an image of the digipak on it too. This is so the audience know what they are looking for when going to buy the digipak. I've also included the record label logo on the bottom left-hand corner and the artists' website address on the bottom right hand corner.

I think my advertisement is complete! I have included everything that is necessary on an album advertisement I think.....

Digipak near to completion

Production for anciallary work

Below are screenshots of how the inside of my digipak is looking so far!

I have changed the quotation so that they are the exact words of the one in our video. As you can see I've included a yellow boarder around the CD, and a yellow boarder around the hole in the middle. I've included the record label 'columbia', and some copyright information below. (Originally, I has three record label logo's but I then realised artists' are usually signed to just one record company, so I had to delete two and delete one!)

I thought the artists' face looked a bit dull, so I added some yellow to his face by using the bucket tool. I thought this will look good as the yellow will match the yellow I have used throughout the digipak - so it will look consistent.

Production of Ancillary work: Carry on create my digipak

After trying out a few fonts I have decided to go with CaptureIt2. The reason for this is that i feel that it relates well with my genre and also the it goes with the urban theme that I initially wanted to go with. Now that i have selected what font I am going to use, I was now faced with the task of editing and cropping my image of my artist that would go on my front cover. Below are some of the steps I took to do so:

I used the Magic wand tool to Delete the background out, as you can see in the top left hand corner i had to reduce the tolerance to about 15. I did this to make the Magic wand tool less sensitive to colour, which in turn would make it easier to crop out my artist from the background. 

After doing this, the image still had my artists neck and shoulders in it.  So to get rid of them; as I only wanted my artist face, I used the Polygonal lasso tool. I used this because it was the easiest and most effective way to select a specific section of an image.

I then adjusted the Saturation to -100 to make my image Grayscale.

Then I ever so slightly adjusted the input levels, to give my image a sort of shadowy effect. Which I thought mad my picture look quite cool.

This is as far as I got that lesson, as you can see it isn't much; but I hope to improve it in my next lesson.

Production of Ancillary work: Carry on create my digipak part 2

As you can see in my previous blog I mentioned that I wasn't happy with my picture which was on my front panel. I didn't like the fact that I couldn't find any effects that suited the image so I took a few more photos of our artists, this time with him wearing big headphones just like how I planned it as you can see in my mock-up.

After I  did a simple spot healing tool I cropped the image and it did not come out as I did in my mock-up, without the artists shoulders and chest his head looked really wierd..

So I decided to re-crop the image and include his shoulders and chest and this is how it ended up looking...

On my back panel I have now added the copyright label and also repeated the serial number which is shown on my spine. I have also added the record labels logo.

Choosing a font

 As I mentioned in one of my prior blogs, choosing a font is one of the most important decisions a person has to make when they're trying to create a digipak. A tool  that i found most useful when it came to searching for and selecting fonts was a pice of software called Fontcase. 

Fontcase is a font management application that provides an elegant and powerful workflow to help you when you want to select a font; it also as an easy to use import system where u can select and activate your chosen fint to import into PhotoShop. 

After Activating a range of fonts and importing them into photoshop, I tried how my artist name (Nathan Miller) would look in some of them. Bellow is a screenshot of me doing this:

Production of Ancillary work: Carry on create my digipak

I have decided to put an effect on the image that is on the front panel as I think it looks too plain but after checking out the effects that are on photoshop elements I have decided to not put one on as I believe they wouldn't make the image look any better.

For the 3rd time I have changed my font that I used for my track list as well as my album name. I think that after this change The front panel looks better as now both fonts (artist name and album name) looks futuristic/techno as well as being bold enough to be easily read.

I have also now added my barcode on my back panel as well as doing my spine which includes the artists name, album name and also the serial number of the album which most albums have.

Here is my digipak so far