Task 4: Practise Digipak

For my final preliminary task, I intend to make a rough album cover using Photoshop. This will prepare me for the later task of completing a digipak to accompany my music video and website.

My album cover is going to belong to the pop genre and, therefore, I intend to make it appeal to a younger audience of 13-25 year olds. The gender of my target audience is predominately female so I will use an image of a female artists.

For this cover, I have decided to use an image which I photographed for my magazine coursework last year:

To begin with, I opened Photoshop and created a document of the dimensions 4.724 x 4.724 inches (this is the standard size for an album cover).

I then dragged my image onto the document and sized it accordingly.

Next, I used the selection tool to remove the background. To do this, I selected around the featured model and clicked ‘Select’ > ‘Inverse’ to ensure that the entirety of the background was selected.

Once the background was removed, I sourced the following image from ‘Google images’:

I then placed this image onto Photoshop.

Using ‘Layer Style’, I changed the opacity of my image so that I could get some of the background’s glittery texture to be see through the image. I thought that this would achieve an interesting effect.

I also added ‘Inner Glow’ through ‘Layer Style’, selecting a rainbow colour scheme. This added a golden tone to the image of the model.

The final touch for this preliminary task was to add text. I knew I wanted to add bold, sans serif font to my text. I ended up going for the font ‘Ariel Black’ for the album title, and the smaller, slimmer font of ‘Avenir Next Condensed’ for the artist name.

Overall, I think that the album cover looks okay generally, however, many things could have been executed better. For instance, my use of the selection tool was rough and did not produce clean removal of the background. Equally, the text placement looks rather basic and makes the cover seem far too simplistic to appeal to the consumer.