Creating the Back Cover: CD

For the back cover, unlike the front cover, we decided to have the photo of Alice relate to the music video itself. As the front cover pictre was used to promote the whole album we felt the back cover could focus on the song we have used for our music video. As you can see in the photo below, Alice's make up is run down her face, and a photo like this will be used to keep continuity. I feel the photo is very effective at portraying sadness and upset and we have chosen a successful photo.

Much like the rest of the digi pack we also wanted the back cover to have a black and white to again keep conituity as well as it being an successful effect to use. We used photoshop to edit our photo and the 'halftone pattern' to turn it to black and white. This not only changed the colour of the photo but also made it lighter, which as a group we thought was effective and really liked this.

The photo below shows the image after it has been edited, and the use of the 'halftone pattern' effect has actually allowed the focus of the photo to be on Alice's eyes, and this is extremely effective as the audiences attention is on the sad and upset emotion that Alice is protraying through her eyes.

As you can see from above our photo is on a white background, however after discussion we decided that the photo should be on a darker background as it would Allow Alice to stand out more, especially in the face. We therefore looked at CD Covers with darker backgrounds and came across Adele's. On this album the photo of Adele is faded into the background by using a 'smudge' effect which is something we really want ti incorporate into our own product.

This feature makes the image look much more professional and is better suited for our CD cover, and no attention is drawn away from Adele. Due to this, we started experimenting on PhotoShop to see which effect would work best for our own product. Firstly, we used effects on the background by putting an outline around Alice's face so that when we put a dark background on Alice's face would stand out. We did this by changing the diameter and hardness of the brush, which created a 'blurred' effect around alice. We then deleted the rest of the background for now.

The circled parts in the photo below show the parts of the picture which are very hard to edit, mainly due to her hair. To overcome this we will make sure to zoom in on the photo and be extremely careful around these parts.

We then used the paint tool to make the background completely black

This effect is very useful in creating a good image for the back cover of our digi pack. The black background keeps the conituity running throughout the album and also can correlate to the blackmake up running down alice's face. The use of the colour black also creates connotations of depression, death, and sadness, and can be heavily linked to Adele's album cover.

The next stage that was necessary was adding the song titles which are always shown on the back cover of an album, and we did this on the programme 'In-Design'. We again kept the same font of 'Adobe Garamond Pro' to again keep continuity running throughout. We included 10 songs on the back of our album as this is what our research showed, and kept the titles of the songs similar to 'Perfect' to keep in the attitude of depression and sadness.

After putting the song titles on the page we decided to put the photo on so we could get more of a feel for the spacing and how it would look on the page.

After putting the photo on the page we decided the text did not look right where it was so moved it around and experimented a little. We encountered a problem, that the photo cut off the top and bottom of the page.

After discussing, we decided as a group that we would move the photograph up and have the text at the bottom of the page.

This evidence shows that you can clearly see when the photograph ends, and it is something we needed to change as it looked extremely unprofessional. Before we edit it at all we will add the text to see if it makes a positive contribution at all.

We firstly experimented by having the name of the artist going down the side of the page, which is similar to Adeles. We made sure to rotate the text 90 degress so that is laid vertically.



We then added the titles of the songs to the page to see how this looked. We actually want the titles to be more spaced out however will come to this problem later.

As you can see from above the bottom of the photograph still cuts off very sharply and as a group we felt this was not professional and we did not like it. To change this we will have the photo of Alice fade into the background colour and at the bottom. By using the gradient function, we could make the bottom of the picture lighter. When trying this it didn't work, so instead we tried editing the photograph to make the edges softer. In the end the programme used was colour and paint and it gave a slightly 'ghostly' effect which emphasizes her sadness and depression.

This photo will be used for the back cover and we will now place the writing and other information on the page

Next we had to create the bar code for the back cover, these are featured on every single album that is sold. We created this on microsoft word and it was very easy to make:

The picture below shows the bar code on the back cover:

For the next stage of making the back cover, we went back to our research again and looked at Adele's back cover and we gained the idea of putting 'bonus tracks' on our cover like she has on hers:

We then added the terms and conditions onto the cover to let our customers know about the copy rights of the CD:

We wanted to make sure our terms and conditions looked professional, whilst keeping it linked to the real products we researched. When writing our terms and conditions we made up names for the producers and other people involved as we are not making a product to sell

Shown below is our final product which includes the bar code, song titles, terms and conditions, and the edited image itself. I feel it is successful and links in well with the rest of my CD cover