CD Cover

My concept was to create a fictional CD cover for my brothers band “The Garden Gnomes.” I wanted this CD cover to reflect the band’s personality, attitudes and the type of music they play. “The Garden Gnomes” play a cross between grunge (e.g. “Nirvana”) and alternative (e.g. “Radiohead”) music. The band has a very outgoing personality so I really felt it necessary for it to show through their CD cover. I decided to create a sort of psychedelic CD cover that brings all the elements mentioned before together. The target audience is males between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. I think the edgy fonts and the bizarre look of this cover matche the style of music that they play and will attract that particular demographic.

I used the Fireworks program to create this CD cover. I layered a few images, used the Polygon lasso tool to select a certain part of an image that I placed on top of the background layer. I then distorted the colors of these images. I then found appropriate fonts for my target audience and incorporated them into the CD cover. I applied the principles of design we learnt in class as much as possible. Many colors are contrasting on this cover. For example the words “Weird dreams” are blue but they are highlighted with a complementary color, orange. The white background makes all the colors seem very vibrant. Although the colors contrast each other on this CD cover many of them are repeated. For example, I took the blue and the green of the background image and used those colors both for the band’s name “The Garden Gnomes” and the CD title “Weird Dreams”.

I was not too sure what to expect when I first started using Fireworks for this assignment. I knew what sort of feel I wanted to give the cover but was not quite sure I would be ale to convey it with the resources on Fireworks and my limited knowledge of this program. There were a few challenges at the beginning. What I had originally envisioned at the beginning did not turn out like I had planed and left me with a disappointing piece of work. I brainstormed ideas and found other ways of conveying my message with different images and a different approach.

In the end, my CD cover came out better then planned. It does not look like my original idea; but I think that after figuring out the limitations of a program like Fireworks I was able to get a better idea of what I was capable of creating.


***What I got from the in class feedback is that there is not enough distinction between the bands name (The Garden Gnomes) and the title of the CD(Weird Dreams). I see how it could be problematic, thus I should either make the bands name bigger or even underline it to make it more obvious that this is the bands name. I believe people in class thought it was an effective CD cover that really depicted what a weird dream might look like. It grabbed their attention. This is the target market I was going after with the CD cover so I believe I did a good job in making it appealing to this particular demographic.