OUGD503 - Responsive - Secret 7 - Development

After carrying out my research and a little photography I was able to begin working on my cover sleeve design. 

I wanted to keep the design interesting yet simple. I wanted there to be a lot negative space on my design so to give all the attention the the image that I produce.

I started by importing the images of trees and branches that I had thought would be effective for the design. Below is my favourite image.

I loved how the image of this tree matched so closely to that dark theme of the song and the environment that was in the music video. I thought it would be the best image to use and edit long with my researched colours, blue and silver.

I altered the image constantly over and over, whilst exploring with different shades of blue and grey/silver. Below are a few practice designs that I created during the experimentation. I wanted a very perfect image of a tree so I altered the image to make the tree more balanced. I then used the brush preset tool to transform the section of the image I required into a brush I could use endlessly. this was really useful because it made the process of making changes, adding and taking away elements a lot easier. It also gave me the ability to experiment with different shades of blue without any confusion.

I liked these designs for an album cover however I felt that they were too weak to use as design for the song.

I took these designs to peers for some feedback. The feedback i received was quite mixed, I was told that the designs were very tranquil but were maybe a little too simple and needed to be more interesting. I also received comments on the colour use within the design, I received a comment to increase the colour in the design. Since I wanted to use the colours blue and silver, the designs above seemed to be lacking in those colours.

I continued with the design, and decided to emphasise the image of the tree by mixing it with more blue.

I had the idea of overlapping to achieve this, the technique of overlapping let me emphasise the amount of colour I could use on the single image whilst keeping the design simple and neat. I wanted to communicate the style of the song and the song name into the design.

I am really happy with how the design came out for 'clearest blue', I really wanted to give attention the the theme of the song and communicate the word 'blue' and 'clear' Also i tried to incorporate the nature of my key words into the style to achieve something expressive.

However I feel that if I had more time to experiment with the design, I would have liked to have used more shaded of blue and maybe experiment with more new brush creations.