Magazine Poster

Audience Response:

Sophie, 21. "It looks visually attractive and informative. It's very effective with the use of bold headings and use of red colour."

Josh, 19. "The XX is bold and eye catching; you can tell that its the band name as it jumps out at you with the white shadowing. I think including the singles is a good idea however it could be seen as a bit tacky."

Rosie, 24. "I don't like the white boxes at the bottom which are placed behind the track names, but i like the roses agains the white box. However, everything else looks really professional and slick; portraying the vibe which the album is going for."

Jack, 18. "The continuity of the rose appearance is a fantastic way of creating synergy, the red colour really stands out and helps connote the idea of love."  

2nd Draft

Due to a reoccurring comment from our audience feedback, we decided to remove the two white boxes which included the track names. We realised that it wasn't necessary and looked like a more professional advertisement.

Below are a selection of possible images to use in our magazine advertisement, they were taken with a Cannon 700D. Some rose petals were placed in a bowl of water to emphasise the saturation and purity of the red.

The Creation of our Digipak / The Inside Panel

The Inside Panel

Just like one of my favourite bands, The 1975, we took inspiration from their advertisement techniques and put this image in black and white, in order to create an edgy feel. However, our panel has a slight twist as it is not solidly black and white like other bands, we left the symbolic red roses in bright colour. By doing this we are making the audience think about the meaning of the flowers and also familiarising them with the repetition within our promo; this creates a sense of band/fan loyalty. The colour choices work well with our indie genre well and appeals to our teenage target audience of both sexes. We used Photoshop CS6 to edit this picture and it took about an hour to finalise; the photo was taken on the first day of filming in Eton. Tallulah being featured on the inside panel helps with promoting our star image without it primarily being about her; which is one of the reasons we kept her in black and white. We also didn’t select an image where she is looking straight at the camera, we discovered that most indie genre bands promote their lead singers in a subtle way, which I believe we conform to.

After we narrowed the images down to just two, we received a class vote which determined which one to use as the panel. We began the tedious activity of editing; in order to convert everything but the roses to a black and white effect we used the quick selection tool to select the roses. We then duplicated the original image and then cut around the black and white roses, revealing the coloured original roses.

For the final couple of adjustments, we lowered the brightness of the image to make it look as if we shot it at night time, thus linking to the music promo ‘Night time – The xx’

The Creation of our Digipak / The CD Panel

As you can see above, this is our CD panel for the disk part of our digipak. The continuous theme of the rose is featured on this as we discovered that after a few drafts, the circular shape of the rose fitted nicely with the disk template. As for the piercing red colour which catches your eye straight away, this is placed where the CD is going to be, to indicate where the rawest, vivid emotion is located. Originally we were going to keep the background a plain white colour, however after experimenting and playing with other pastel neutral backgrounds, we decided that the light blue colour compliments the rose best. The ‘sky blue’ tone fits with the theme of nature within our specific genre of indie rock. Again, we took a screenshot of a video which was taken of the rose in the decaying process for our promo, we just increased the contrast saturating levels in Photoshop to emphasise the shadows between the layers of petals, which makes the rose look extremely defined and visually attractive.

Firstly, we simply searched google images for the correct colour which we were interested in using for the background. We then dragged the photo from the website, into the application of Photoshop and created it as a new layer of our Digipak. As we were unaware of how to make all of the sides an equal size, we manually got a ruler and put it against the screen and took down the measurements. Later we googled how to do it within Photoshop, for next time.

Next step was inserting the picture of the rose. We chose the perfect screenshot and then took the lasso tool to remove any unwanted pieces of the image. Zooming in really helped to get into the tiny corners of the petals to make sure we have the cleanest image with no black background involved.

Below is the step by step process with screenshots.

The original image

The magic wand tool was used to automatically select certain parts to delete

The rose without the background 

The final piece!