Finalising Magazine Ad!

Following my last design ideas, I had some feedback from my classmates about which designs they prefer. As shown above, they liked the silhouette image of Ed in the corner of the ad opposed to the one of him standing.

The set out of the design makes it look like he is looking into the light in the middle of the poster. I then had to decide where to put the text without making the rest of the poster look too crowded. I also played around with the colour of the text to see what suited it best.

As I don't have to include the record label, I tried designs with and without it to see which looked better. Isaac and Emma, two of my fellow students said that they preder the designs with the record label which persuaded me to design some more posters with the record label included.

More Ad Ideas!

These six designs are what I have left to play with and edit to decide which one I will eventually use. Currently, the one I am focusing most on is the top, middle one. I prefer the text in that one to the other text and I also like silhouette image in the bottom right hand corner as opposed to the standing one. I may also play around with the red design more to see what other effects I could add to make it look better.

Magazine Ad Development

I decided to try out a photo of Ed for the magazine ad with the same background idea as what I already have. I opened the photo into photoshop and edited it into black and white as well as changing the contrast and saturation to make it more appealing and to match the dark colours of the ad that I was going for:

I originally took this photo in black and white from the camera, using photoshop, I cropped it and edited it.

This is the process of cropping the image. The dark outer area of the photo being the bit that I deleted from the photo.

I played with the exposure and offset levels to get this effect, I then used the lasso tool to select the part of the image that I wanted and then clicked 'refine edge' to feather the image to give an overall result.

This is the final edit that I came up with which I then put on one of the backgrounds that I designed on Adobe Illustrator to give me a rough idea of what it would look like.

I don't think this works well as a design, I could change the background to suit the photo more, however I prefer the silhouette images infront of the fading background that I have previously designed.

Designing the magazine ad

The initial thoughts I had on the poster included dark colours and the use of gradient. I used this idea and therefore produced a variety of backgrounds on adobe illustrator including these:

From here, I opened up some of the photos I had taken in the photo shoot and started playing around with different edits and placing them onto the backgrounds to see if any of them looked good. I still stuck with the dark colours and these are the types of things I came up with:

As well as changing the background and the edits of the photos from the shoot, I added the artist name and tried out different fonts to see which one looked best:

From these deigns, I developed the ones I like the best and the ones I thought delivered the right message and mood which were these:

Finalisation of names

After realising that I could not proceed any further without deciding what names I will use for the Artist, Track and Album, I finally chose what to use! I was not happy with the names I had thought of for the Artist name and therefore googled 'UK male names' which actually really helped me. After going through every male name in my head and trying to picture it on a didgipack for my particular track, I realised that a short, sharp name works well. I got this from 'Dan Lowe' that I originally thought of and therefore I have chosen to use the name Rob Young. I put this by classmates to see what they thought and they all agreed with my choice!

All along, I have liked the album name 'Unconcious Living' as I think it works well with the vibe of the song. I also think it fits becasuse the artist has a distinct voice and I imagine him making an album with consiting of very similar songs. So, to confirm...I will be naming the album Unconcious Living.

I have inspiration from my previous ideas for the track name. 'You see the bad in me' is one of the ideas I like, however I thought it was too long and therefore I have decided to shorten it down to The bad in me.

After finally decidng the names, I can now get on with producing my digipack and poster!

Song, Album and Artist Name Feedback

Here is a quick show of what feedback I got about the names I have thought of. Unconscious living is quite a popular choice for the album name and it is one of my favourites so I am temped to use this. Dan Lowe is the most popular name for the artist however I don't think it fits and therefore I will think of some more choices. 'Bad Dreams' is the most chosen song name out of my choices which is understandable because the song lyrics include the words 'bad dreams'. I think this is a suitable choice however it is also too plain and obvious in my opinion. 'Distance' is what my teacher suggested and George liked 'You see the bad in me'. I agree with Georges choice here, I think 'You see the bad in me' relates well to the song and the lyrics, however the sound of the word 'Distance' has a certain ring to it and is also very relevant.

Feedback Followup

After getting feedback from my peers about the look of my actor yesterday, I decided to modify his clothing colours to see how the darker clothing would look. Instead of hunting down my performer to do another shoot in different, darker clothes, I decided to do a quick colour edit of his hair and his clothing on adobe photoshop and this is what I came up with...

Feedback

I had some feedback from my classmates on what clothing they picture on my actor as the casual chinos and white polo top is not working! When intentionally listening to the voice of the singer and imagining who I could picture singing it, I came up with Professor Snape from Harry Potter. I think this might be due to the 'whiney' effect of the singers voice. From this, I imagined dark, skinny clothing and dark hair.

My classmates agreed with this. Alice said she saw the actor with ginger hair and wearing no shoes. This is a very individual look which would probably work, however I do not think my performer would be willing to dye his hair and therefore I will need to compromise. I like the idea of no shoes as this is very different and 'indie'. Emma, another classmate of mine saw a bold character wearing a checked shirt with the top button done up. Although this is also an individual look, I didn't think this worked too well-I did not like the 'bold' idea. I also got feedback from my teacher who said that he thinks the character should be 'messy and dirty' and wear plain, dark clothes. I agree with this, the cream chinos and white polo top is very 'boy band' and clean and does not match the voice of the singer. This became evident to my teacher when he saw the photo shoot that I had done with Ed.

Photo shoot- I also got feedback from my teacher about the angles and poses in my photo shoot. I was happy with my photos as I thought they showed the subdued mood produced by the track and I was glad that my teacher agreed.

Song and artist name- I was undecided on what names to use for the track and artist and therefore asked a few people what they thought. I will put the results into a table and post it onto my blog. Getting other people's opinions really helps me decide when I like more than one idea!