Creating the CD outside cover art

As the song is called 'fireworks', we thought it would be only fitting to have the front cover reflect this in some way. In our research we had observed a few main features of CD covers in our genre.
- Bold Text in a clear and bold font
- Not all covers had artist images
- Use of vibrant colour

We have decided against using a picture of our artist as one will be featured on our magazine advert. We have also decided to use a theme of fireworks overlaying clear and bold text. Below you is a rough design of our idea:

FRONT COVER

This is a rough layout we intent to use on our cover, over a black background. We are aiming for a simplistic style in our design.

From here, we created our entire cover on Adobe Photoshop, here's how:

We first created a new document w the dimensions being 12x12 inches

We then created our background layer, using fill tool on the document we created to make it black.

We now have our canvas. The next stage required us to find images of fireworks that we could then manipulate into looking like the clip art styled images we need.

We found a suitable image of a firework through searches on google. We then imported the said image into photoshop. First we desaturated it to make it black and white by clicking Image>Adjustments>Hugh/Saturation... We than applied the following settings:

Now the image had become black and white, we had to apply an effect that would give it the clip art like appearance. We chose the stamp effect by clicking Filter>Sketch>Stamp... We then applied the following settings:


We then duplicated the result so we had two copies of the firework clip art on our document. We used a colour overlay to make them both white and placed then where we thought best. Here is the result:


Now we had the fireworks in place, it was time to add the text. We searched dafont.com for a suitable font and we discovered on named 'Roadway', we imported this font into photoshop and, following the rough layout of our plan, added the text to the image using the Horizontal type tool tool.



We then changed the colours of of text. To a pale orange and a very slightly orange tinted white. We also placed the text and changed its size by clicking Edit>Transform>Free Transform. Here is the result.

We then added a gradient to give an orange theme to the front cover. The gradient was added with the gradient tool on the sidebar and the following settings:


We also added the compulsory parental advisory logo into the bottom corner and here is the result:


The bulk of the work is now done, but we still need to add the effects that will give a professional look to our cover. First of all, I wanted to give the cover some paper texture so that it carried a similar style to the poster and our disc, which are all paper themed. I found that many of the photoshop effects available to me were not good enough as they were too neat and structured in their design, so i decided to find an image of paper texture through google. This is what I chose:

Once placed in the document, this image obviously needed some editing before it gave the desired effect. First we had to set the blending mode to overlay in the layer pallet so that the image would blend in with our cover. However this was to strong so the opacity had to be changed, these are the setting given to the layer:


This produced the following:

Now the cover is almost complete, all that remains is to overlay the firework images, again found in google, to give our front cover the final touches it needed. The following images were found:

Once placed into the cover image, these layers were both given the blend mode of overlay and each had their opacity changed to levels that suited us. Once we were happy with the result, we readded the parental advisory logo and we were finished. Here is the end result:


BACK COVER

Click to enlarge

SPINE

Creation of the spine was quick and easy. The spine is 0.8 inches wide and 12 inches in length. As with the front cover and the back cover, we followed a number of stages.
-background of spine set to black
-Roadway font, Horizontal Type Tool and Free Transform used to make the text span the entire spine as seen on many covers we researched.
- Text set to the same pale orange and orange tinted white colours as used in the front cover stages.
-Young Money record label logo imported from google and placed at the top of spine, as seen on other young money CDs.
-Finally, a firework image added on a layer over everything. The blend mode is set to overlay and opacity is changed, as before.

Here is the final result: