Developing a Rough Digipak : Front Cover

As a group, a decision was made that the two rough attempts at a Digipak front cover were not good enough quality to compete with the Digipaks on sale today. Therefore we decided it would be best to try and combine the two ideas into a third attempt to create a better quality front cover. This turned out to be the third and final rough piece and below was how it was developed.

STEP 1

Using the Photoshop software, Tom used a 12x12cm canvas as the base of the front cover. This size is exactly the same as real Digipak dimensions. Dragging the image of our artist onto the canvas, Tom proceeded to manipulating the image to look like it had been sketched. To do this he first desaturated the image, then used the filter tool and modified certain sketch settings to get the perfect look. Finally he played around with the blending options to create the final image.



STEP 2

For the background, Tom used a golden, canvas-like texture found on the internet and dragged it onto his Photoshop canvas. Using the square-shape tool, Tom created a black strip to go along the bottom of the front cover, which would hold the title of the track and the parental advisory sticker. He used the font 'Roadway' for the 'Fireworks' text and then merged the black strip and text layers together. Finally, using the magic wand tool, Tom deleted the text from within the black strip to create the effect that the text is behind the strip.


STEP 3

Using the same text used for 'Fireworks', Tom created the simplistic bold text in the top right of the front cover. The is a very generic text type used throughout the rap genre, there are rarely fancy fonts and bold, plain fonts seem to be the most popular. To emphasise the text more, an outer glow was applied to to the text via layer options.


STEP 4

FIinally, a firework-like graphic was created by Tom to improve the background and create a connection between the song and the digipak. The tools used were the magic wand, background eraser, hue saturation, opacity settings and glow tools. To finish, the canvas texture was duplicated but then the opacity was reduced so that all layers would have a canvas like texture (except the artist image).