CD Cover - Will Heller

After my first design of a CD cover I decided to look at some of the top album artwork over the years. A lot of the entries in lists were iconic albums of artists such as; The WHO, The Beetles and The Rolling Stones. I couldn't really see anything particularly special about the design of the cover, and think a lot of the decisions where mad on the impact of the actual artist not the cd cover. A features that were common among these CD covers was the use of band members or artists. In the cases were the artist does not appear on the CD cover, some did used complex designs to wow the audience. However a lot went for a simple and obscure approach, below are a couple examples of this. (Muse - Origin of systems, Pink Floyd - Dark side of the moon, The Van Buren Regulars - 14 seconds till' 3 and Bring me the Horizon - Count your Blessings) 

As you can see from the few CD covers above above, the design does not need to be very complex to make an interesting cover. Pink Floyd's cover for Dark Side of the Moon was hugely successful and is now used for all sorts of merchandise. This is helpful for me as I am going to me restricted with the imagery I can use, as this we be generated randomly from the link in the instructions for making the CD cover (refer to previous post). 

Below are the screenshot from the randomly generated pages. The Wiki page is for American football player Will Heller, the last five words of the quote are 'the hurt. Let it go.' and the flicker image is of a tick.

There was no immediate idea towards a design as these three sources came up. I was happy to be given an actual name for the wiki page, that should make the design make a bit more sense. The quote was a bit odd, I was not sure whether to keep the full-stop in it. Lastly the image, a tick, it may be difficult to make an image of a tick look good. I opened the image in photoshop and scaled it to the size of the CD cover - 800px by 800px. I tried to put my research of CD covers to good use and went for a simple and slightly obscure design by changing the hue and colour balance of the image.









I quite like the effect this had on the image, it made a fairly boring image into a bold and exciting image. It may be too much for some but I think that for format of CD covers allows this bolder expression of design.

For the text I searched online for free font downloads and came across one called Track. I thought the font looked different so decided to try it. The way the font links its 'R's' and 'K's' is unique and I like the way it creates a postmodernist feel to the CD cover. The image below shows how I used grid lines to aline the name of the artist and the title of the band.

On my second attempt at designing the CD cover I used another skill developed at university, photography. I booked the photo studio to take a couple of images of myself as the module. I then opened an image in photoshop and then layered the tick to appear like it was on my skin. I found that this look best when I de-saturated the image of myself so it was black and white. And also altered the colour of the tick to a green, via the hue setting.  Once scaled and moved into a position I was happy with I added the text to the CD cover, keeping the font to 'track'.  The result of this can bee seen below. In a odd way the tick sort of relates quite well to the album, as there it hurt can be seen as a parasite, like the tick.

Unfortunately this design is too simple in its appearance. The concept is there of a person getting rid of the parasite tick, relating to the album name of getting rid of the hurt. Yet the design is very 2D in its appearance. Due to this I will be using the first design as my final CD cover, shown below.