Week 3; Colour & Image; CD Cover

CD Cover Evaluation

In this brief evaluation I will be critiquing the front cover of a CD that I have created myself by using InDesign, firstly I will begin to discuss the image itself in terms of licensing. To obtain this particular image I used the stock image online library Flickr.com, whilst searching for an image to use I had to follow the Creative Commons Licensing that Flickr has as I needed an image that I could edit in terms of modifying and adapting the image. Therefore I had to use the advanced search where this was applicable, without this is was difficult to search for an image that I could use for my CD cover.

Before I began to look for a usable image I researched into unsigned artists and bands, this is where I came across an R&B singer called Dick James. After listening to some of his songs I began to know what type of music he produces which led me to the image that I have now. Some of his songs were sad and focused of loneliness such as the song I chose to use as the album cover’s name, “Don’t Need Nobody”. It was this particular song title that made me use an image of an emotional looking man who is sat alone, I believed that this image was appropriate as after listening to the song in my mind I had a visual image of a man all alone which I wanted to portray on the CD cover.

The original image was bigger than the one I use as I decided to trim it down so that the man covered the majority of the cover, whereas the original copy showed more of the background, I still wanted to keep some of the background ad it added to the setting of a lonely man I thought. I chose the image to be in black and white as it made the impact of loneliness more dramatic and obvious to its audience as colour can sometimes create emotions. I wanted to avoid the use of using more emotions than the one I had already created and another reason was due the fact of the genre of this music, as R&B covers make use of the impact that black and white can create.  This also had an influence on the colour I used on the font as I used black again as it fit in with the man’s clothing and stood out against the light background. The font I chose for the text also suitable for the R&B genre as they often use thin looking serif fonts on their CD covers, which I wanted to follow this “rule” so it would be associated with this type of music. I wanted the artists name to be central and above the image of the man as this also follow’s the convention; however as the name was quite short it never looked quite right so I changed the tracking of the letters increasing the space between the letters. Although I did use this same technique with the album’s title, I decreased the tracking so that the letters was closer together to make it look visually better. I chose to emphasise on the sizing of the text to add to the visual design so I made the first letter of each word bigger than the word that followed, I used this technique as I wanted this text to stand out and look subtly eye catching.