Pantone Time

Production is one of the elements I look forward to most on the course, and this week has had it in spades. During self study this week, I started to put together my CD cover for the ‘Russian Spring’ album. I chose to mix the elements of nature with a hot and cold colour scheme for my CD booklet. Knowing Photoshop well allowed me to select the appropriate method to put together the picture needed.

Firstly, I created several squares of colour and then rasterized them, selected them, and then applied a gradient to them. Once this was done, I used a range of wet media brushes to add depth to the surfaces, before using the eraser tool to break up the edges. Once this was completed, I could start to merge the colours together with the smudge too, set to varying strengths depending on the effect I wanted to create. This made the colours of the skyline flow together, much like the ambient sounds on the album.

To add some sense of scale, I added a silhouette of a hillside and then added tree using one of Photoshop’s brushes. I thought that the tree should be small and that there should only be one, to emphasise the scale of the skyline. My CD cover as it stands can be seen below, as well as the inside of the booklet.
At college on Wednesday I decided to bring a CD case to see how my design looked as it would be presented to a customer or client. I’d recommend everyone to try this; it really brings your design to life and makes it look totally different. It also highlights the design challenges posed by the spines of the CD, where choosing an appropriate font is very difficult. I chose the Tahoma font for my CD, as it looks contemporary and subtle which I think suits the type of music. It also looks good at small sizes, which is handy when creating the copyright text on the rear of the CD. The rear of the CD can be seen below.

I soon discovered that my CD was crying out for a clear inlay, and this gave me the opportunity to continue the hot and cold theme I used inside the CD booklet. I also used the small window in the hinge to display the artist and title of the album vertically, in the same font used on the spine. This part can be seen below.

For the CD label itself I had limited options, as continuous tone would not look good due to the printing process. I also had a limit of 5 pantone colours to use, so I took similar colours to the top inlay (which were mainly blues) and used blocks of colour to create a digital looking skyline. I thought that giving the CD a digital look would complement it well, as the CD itself does contain digital data, and provided a contrast to the surrounding continuous tone. See the picture below for my CD design.

On Wednesday I received my fixed CSS buttons from John (thanks again :) ) so much of Thursday afternoon was spent implanting them back into my pages. I eventually managed to get them working, and much of this weekend will be taken up by the implementation of the content for my corporate identity.

There has been much talk of what the end of year ‘task’ is. I think that it will be some kind of uber feedback session on the year and the course, even though I would much prefer it to be an egg box mk2 challenge. Wishful thinking, methinks.