Magazine Advert for Digipak Final

To begin with, we took the picture from our rough-cut attempt of when we wished to use an overlay of Glenn above the right shoulder of Glenn singing. To do this we had to first crop a shot of Glenn looking down. This shot was then feathered and the opacity was dropped so that the image sat nicely on top of Glenn’s shoulder. However, this shot did not make the final cut.
Yet when attempting to edit this, I saw the shot as it was without it being overlaid onto the other image of Glenn. I then performed a screen grab of this and it ended up looking like this:

I then had to edit the purple mark on top of Glenn’s hood out of the picture, and for this I used the patch tool. This allowed for me to remove this blemish and it then seemed as if it was never there.

I then went on to choose a font as this is key to both this ancillary task, and the CD cover as we wished to create a house style. was lucky seen as the first font that I saw on dafont.com was in fact 'Sweet Confusion', which I believe suited the purposes of this very well. I then downloaded this to Photoshop, the program used for the design of the magazine digipak.

I began to type out the text for the first draft, alongside and around the image. After typing this out, I decided to try and attempt to put an outer glow on the text, as it seemed to plain, and after a while of testing different settings, I settled on:
Opacity: 100%
Technique: Softer
Spread: 0
Size: 6
Range: 50%
Jitter: 0%

Furthermore, I downloaded a star font to use in the creation of the stars for the reviews of the album. Unfortunately, the stars were not very attractive so I had to edit them by adding a 'Bevel and Emboss' feature. I also added a contour to it. This left me with a very satisfactory shape and look to the stars, which I believe fitted in with both the piece and other real world adverts.

However, as mentioned in an earlier blog post, I discovered that the magazine advert had to be designed for an A4 piece. This proved to be a hindrance as the picture would not stretch to an A4 piece of paper without looking obviously stretched, so I had to redesign the cover.
I used almost all of the same text, having to edit the settings for the outer glow as the font size had to be increased.
This left me with this draft of the advert:


However, after receiving feedback regarding this, I discovered that it was too empty and did not have enough on the page. Due to this I added in a picture of the CD cover, which I went on to add an outer glow to. I then rearranged the layout of the page so the CD cover fitted in better. Finally, I added in 3 logos at the bottom of the page to authenticate the advert more. These were the iTunes logo; the logo for Joshua Radin's record label, Mom and Pop records; and the HMV logo.
This meant that my final draft was:



I believe that our group's magazine advert has turned out very well and that it represents a very standard representation of real media adverts. Furthermore, I believe that is a piece that attracts the viewers eye with its simple layout and colour scheme and that it would encourage many people to purchase the album.