Typography Photography

This is one of my favourite digital experiments, because it combines photography, typography and a lot of colours. For this experiment I followed a tutorial to help me through the process of this.  

The first step was to open two new document in Adobe Photoshop, one for the text and one for the image. To start off with I had to select the shadows and mid-tones of the images and copy them into a new layer. Once I had done that I clicked into the other document, this is where is pasted the song lyrics to make a brush stamp. The the font I used was called 'Giddyup Std, the text really appealed to me because of how hand written it looked. 

I then saved the lyrics and the song title/artist name as a brush. This meant that I was able to add this to the image. Going back to the images, I made a new layer to add the text to it. I used different size brushes all over the image to get an overlay of the lyrics. After that I then went into the blending options and chose the colours I wanted to use, making sure they suited the correct artist. After picking the right colours and gradient, I then used a soft brush with the opacity turned down slightly, to define the areas of the singers faces to get the artist the showing through the lyrics. 

Finally I then added the artist name and the name of the song to the design, making sure it was black so people would know who the artist/band and song. Above are the original images that I used to create the photo typography design. Below are the final outcomes that I created with the reason why I chose the photo, colours and lyrics.         

Digital Experiments

  For some digital experimentation, I choose to follow some tutorials on how to make typography interesting in photoshop. I picked words that are related to my project; Music,Hate and Lyrics. For these three experiments I decided to choose different techniques for each word, as I thought it would give me more of a range of techniques I could possible use for my final outcome. 

For the first experiment, I found a tutorial that makes words in to look like its melting and gives it an ICE AGE effect. I made the background black so the letters would stand out more. After following a lot of steps, this is the final outcome. of the design. I really love this effect because of the contrast between the rainbow colour and the black background. I also like the bright light that is in the bottom right hand corner, because it gives it another dimension. Also the 'icicles' that are coming down from the letters are very unique and are more eye-catching than having the letters in a normal font.

The second digital experiment that I did was on the word HATE, I thought I would use this word because of the amount of power that you can portray with different fonts. I choose to write the word in capitals so it would stand out more and make it black. I then duplicated the text layer and moved it slightly to the left to make the word a little three dimentional. I had the words on a white background but I didn't feel it worked as well, so I added a textured background and changed it to a gradient of red and white. I think this adds to the effect of the final outcome because it catches your attention more now than it did before.

      

For the final design I choose the word LYRICS, and kept this quite simple just with a black background and colour outer glow. I kept the text quite simple, and the gradient I used was between silver going into black. By making the font silver/black it make it look 3D in a way. I was undecided if I was going to have to have the outer glow as thick as this, only because I was unsure whether it would be to in your face and over powering to look at. But in my opinion I feel that it adds something to the design and makes it more appealing to the public and possibly more meaningful. 

Song Lyrics

Here is the three different themes I will use and the six songs that I have been inspired by.

Self Assessment

Mood Board

HERE IS MY FINAL MOOD BOARD OF DIFFERENT IMAGES FROM DESIGNERS WORK, THAT REALLY APPEAL TO ME FOR THE PROJECT OF MAKING A MUSIC LYRIC POSTER. 

1.Si Scott
2.Tumblr Image
3.Taylor Swift Lyric
4.Music Philosphy
5.Tumblr Image
6.Sophie Henson
7.Dominique Fella
8.Tumblr Image

My Personal Project Brief - Final

Here is my 

final draft of my brief for this personal project. Hopefully I will be able to succeed with this brief and create a great outcome. 

In-depth Analysis - Mico Toledo

This is a poster design by Mico Toldeo (Music Philosophy) he is an artist that works in London. He takes song lyrics from lots of genres of music and choosing significant lyrics from those different songs. He is very unique in what he does. The understanding of his work is that he uses the same sort of technique throughout his designs, creating a more appealing insight to the lyrics.




The aesthetics of this design is all about the colour and the chosen lyrics from Elton John - Your Song. The use of white text and red background compensates very well together and the white bounces off the red to stands out very well. Also the text is very relevant to the song I feel. The song lyrics that have be chosen are very powerful and the styles of all capital letters suit it very well. 
 


Toldeo also creates a picture for you with the lyrics, by adding little images or something relating to the song. For this poster he has added an apple; that could be there to represent the world. Also lines have been added to make the poster more appealing.
 


In my opinion, this isn't my favourite design by him only because the font doesn't really stand out. However the design really works well with the song lyrics aswell as the colour connection. All in all Toldeo work is very inspiring to look at and has given me a few ideas to start my Personal Project.  

Whereas this is my favourite designs by Mico, this is because of the use of different colours all combined together to get a really unique effect and I love the lyrics that have been used. Hopefully I will be able to create something like this for my final outcome.  

In-depth Analysis - Si Scott

This is the work of Si Scott, who is a graphic designer who specialise in typography, from the UK. His main inspiration behind each of his designs must fit with the brief. He has also had said to be inspired by music: 'Most of my inspiration comes from music – I am constantly listening to music while I work and the lyrics especially. I’m really into words!' Scott has worked on a lot of different project using his symbolic design, from concert posters, TV advertising, branding companies and illustrations.  


The aesthetics of this design is very good, because all of the letters are all the same height/width, and also have the same equal spaces apart. Whereas the swirls and curved lines are all different sizes. This adds to the design, making it look perfectly neat at the start of the typeface design, then making it bit more fancy and more appealing of it was just a bold font. His technique is using block capital letters then adding lots of different decorative swirls to the typeface, to make it more appealing. Scott has also mentioned that he likes to use type and imagery together: 'I think I came to make this kind of work just through my love of drawing, type and design and trying to do something that encompasses all them together.'  


This is one of my favourite designs he has created because he has incorporated some colour into the design, rather than using just black and white, like he normally would. The way that the letters all interlink with each other with the curved lines, swirls and circular shapes. The meaning behind this design is to emphasise many songs with these words in it 'The Good Die Young'. In my opinion I think that this particular design fits perfectly with the lyrics because, I feel very drawn into the design and the colour choice. The reason behind this is because of the black merges into the redish orange, making it look like someones heart beating for the last time. I feel that if this is what Scott is trying to express, then it is a really good piece of deign that has linked a story behind it. Having memorable lyrics with a really unique design added to it, to make it more significant piece of graphic design. 

Collection of Ideas/Artists

Here is my mood board of ideas for my Personal Project! 

1. Amy Kwan
2. Artistic Typography
3. Niki Pilkington
4. Sophie Henson
5. Quentin Jones
6. Graphic T-Shirt
7. Si Scott
8. Mico Toldeo

Final Idea Sheets

Here are my updated final idea sheets.

Mind Map

Here is my mind map of techniques, inspiration, outcome and theme. 

Idea Sheets

Here are my final idea sheets >>> CLICK

Personal Project Brief

Here is our Personal Project Brief. This basically informs that us as class have to make and design our own brief and outcome that links in with our last project. Even though we had different artist and bands to make our album for, we are completely independent on this project and we get to design own on brief. 

Adjustments

The adjust i made to make my CD packaging much better and get a better grade; I made the net of the CD 1cm bigger so it didn't start to buckle or ripe at the sides. Also i made a double sided poster of both stencil designs that i created. Hopefully with making the packaging more stable and added a poster to it, my grade will become a little bit higher.

Thinking Ahead...

Thinking ahead to our new theme which is The Personal Project, I have had a few ideas being related to the techniques that i have used. Another idea i have had is related to the music side of the CD project. This because if its something you are interested in then its more likely you will putting more effort in completely the work and getting the best possible marks out of the final outcome.

Evaluation of Final Outcome...

This term our project brief was to make a CD for Our Song of the Summer of our favourite artists. I found this brief really easy to adapt to because I love listening to music and when I first heard about it, I felt really enthusiastic about it. The artist that I choose what The Wanted, who are a British/Irish group that were formed in 2009 and have come from nothing to being one of the most well known bands across the world. I wanted to create a CD that would resealable them as a band but put my stamp on it as a fan of theirs.

The creative journey I took with this was with looks of different experiments from typography photos to stencilling to mix-media designs. I found that all of the different techniques were quite challenging in there own way. Also the different artist and designers that i came across was quite eye-opening to look because of the stages they had to go through to get a final result.


The artists that i looked at were Julian Opie and Jonathan Tran. They are both artists that specialise in Illustrations and Stencilling. Opie is most famous for his Blur album cover of the band turned into cartoons. I wanted to use this artist work in the inlay because the booklet is one of the things people like to look at; song lyrics or thank you messages. And with adding pictures to the book, i feel it will give another dimension to it. With Trans work, i was inspired by how something so simple can be so effective when stencilling. I wanted to use his work for my  homemade logo design, by cutting around the logo and spray painting it onto my packaging. 

In my opinion i feel like i have achieved a lot with this project, because it has something to so with my favourite band , so I feel i had to do my absolute best to get it right. I feel that the stencil work has work out great because even though i did scan the spray-painted logo in to the computer, you can still see the detail of the paint splatter. Also i love the booklet as it has also got the stencil logo on it plus the Opie inspired images. Another reason why I like this outcome was because of the masking fluid image stencil that is placed on the second page of the CD packaging. 

If i could improve anything on my packaging it would be to take a little bit time to cut out around the packaging to it looks a lot more cleaner and more professional. As I felt when i folded the net, the folds started to rip slightly, so if i could re-do the folds again i would be happy with that. 

Overall, I have really enjoyed this project, with all the different experiments and techniques that i have learnt over the past couple of months. I have really enjoyed learning how to refine techniques and to create different ways of making packing and booklets. Also analysing different CD albums who suit a range of target audiences. I hope that My Album is relevant to the artist.      

Final Outcome...

I feel my final outcome really worked well. Im proud of how it work out, having all the things i wanted it to have. Such as a good artwork design, e.g the background of the wild west wanted poster, the stencil of the band and logo. Also the booklet design. I had a few complications at the start of the process but i feel i fixed them as soon as possible or even changed them slightly to it would be easier for me to act upon. My prototype worked really well so hopefully when it comes to make the actually packaging it will be perfect.  Here is my final out come in prototype form... 

Final ideas - Booklet

My inlay/booklet design idea wasn't to make it too complicated i just wanted it to have 5 songs and images of the band. I wanted to try and produce images that would work well with the stencilling on the logo on the front of the CD. I was looking at artist and designers for inspiration i came across Julian Opie. Opie is a artist that is most famous for creating the album artwork for Blur's Greatest Hits album.I really like the way that he creates portraits of people, with only their dominate features, such as hair, eyes, mouth and face. I really liked this effect so for the booklet I got pictures of each band member and created my own Opie design. Below is the process..

I started off with these 5 pictures of the band. I didn't want the whole body in the drawing so i choose portraits of them as i though it would be simpler but also still very effective. After finding the right pictures, i traced around the faces with a pencil first onto tracing paper. Then i went round the pencil marks with a fine liner to get the correct detail and the computer would be able to pick up the black lines more than the pencil. Here are my tracings. 

Here are my tracings of the band members. After scanning them into the computer, I uploaded them into Adobe illustrator to make them into a live trace. Live trace means making the parts of the image are joined up with the line that their supposed to be with, then you expand it. Once i expanded the pictures I added colour to, making sure the colours matched the similar tones to actual picture. 

Above is the final outcome of the illustrations inspired by Julian Opie. I really think that I have created a good range of photos that still work with the stencil logo. I really think that having 5 songs on my CD will work well with having these 5 pictures. 

The WANTED Album cover inspiration

Above are all of THE WANTED Singles, Albums and EPs. As you can see the main colours ranges from blues to reds to grey. I want my CD cover to be relevant to them as a band and not get distracted from them as a band, but have a little edge and difference to it. 

I want to keep the element of the band in the artwork, but I don't want to just copy and paste an image they already have. So what I want to do is use one of the techniques that I really enjoyed doing. As the band are called The WANTED, I thought it might be great idea to basically make the design of my artwork like a wild west wanted poster. Here is the tea/coffee stained piece of paper I scanned in, so I can use this as the background for my album artwork. I think that this a good opportunity to change the style of the band design.

For the photo of the band I wanted to use a image that you could see all of the bands face. This is the photo I choose, the reason why I picked this was because of that you can see the detail in the faces, and there is also a lot of dark and shade in it to. With this picture I didn't want to copy an paste into to the artwork, I wanted to make it my own. 

From all the techniques that i have processed and experimented with i really enjoyed doing the stencilling activities. Two artists that i was inspired by were Miles Donavon and Jonathan Tran. These designers a notorious known well for the graffiti art work and stencil designs to promote there own work or work of different people. These two really did give me a push forward to see what I could work with, by using stencil work. 

So with this image i used masking fluid on the white parts of the photo. Once i had let that dry i then painted brown paint onto the page then finally washed the paper with tea and coffee to get the old fashion. This was the final outcome of it. It did take me a while to get the right result. But in my opinion it worked in my favour.

Also staying with the stencil theme i wanted to make the stencil out of my logo design so it all fits in together. So to start my logo stencil i cut around the letters making bridges so the letters would become hard to read. Once the logo was cut out i spray painted different colours onto another piece of paper. Then scanned them into the computer and placed them onto my final packaging design. Here are the spray-painted logo. 

I really did enjoy all of this stencil work as I believe it has really given the album artwork for my band a new look. Even though it is simple it is still eye-catching and very intriguing if you haven't heard or seen the band before. Hopefully people would want to buy this CD not because of who its by, but also how the album has been designed. 

Net design ideas

 My initial ideas for my packaging were quite simple and here are some of them... 

<<For my packaging initial ideas this is one design that i looked at from a previous students work. I like the way that it has been developed and designed. I like the way it has been designed with different compartments and flaps, that show different surface designs, illustrations and typography. 


From this, I designed a net that would hopefully suit my target audience and the band/artist. I really like this net design because it looks simple and it works really well when it holds the CD, when I cut out the prototype. I think this design will be very appealing to the eye as it is very different to any other CD packaging that is sold it the shops.