PRINT BASED MEDIAProduction Evaluation

When looking back at my draft images for the CD I wanted to create, it seemed apparent that having a Lion was an interesting idea. I got some feedback and from the results, I noticed most people liked the lion idea, as they found it interesting and unique but that some improvements could be made, I got this information by asking a set of questions such as

‘Which design do you think is better?’

‘Why do you think this design is better?’

‘With the design you’ve chosen, what improvements do you think could be made?’

Everyone chose the Lion but their reasons varied. Some felt it was the actual Lion Decal I created that made for such an interesting design, others felt it was the miss of colours, whilst bland with grey, black and white, that it stood out in some way but when it came to improvements, I had a lot to take in.

Some people discussed how the Lion in cartoons and movies represents the element of fire and while the bland style of my CD design works, it could be a lot brighter and that playing on that element of fire could be interesting.

Others said that the text needs to be a bit more interesting and stand out more.

With that, I headed into Adobe Photoshop and created a new gradient with a mixture of yellow and red to represent the fire element behind the lion as I enjoyed that concept but also designed a new Lion Decal because the original, whilst looking quite interesting on it’s on, it didn’t fit in well with the red and yellow over tones. The previous design was a lot more calm looking so I wanted something that looked like it was ready for a fight, ready to ‘rise’ from the ashes just like the name ‘Risen Solution.’

So I came up with this. Without adding text or adjusting the lion decal itself, I decided the background needed some changing but I must add that I felt keeping the lion decal black and white was an interesting choice and made for a good contrast between bright colours and black and white, so I still maintained some of the essence that made my previous design quite successful.

I started by going into the filter effects and under distort I found Wave. I was doing this so I could create a ‘sunburst’ effect, once again playing on the fire aspect but only of the sun. These were the settings I used.

It came out something like this, which wasn’t very interesting and what I wanted to use at all, so I decided to go into the filter effects once again, distort along with it and went under polar coordinates. This would be the setting that would ultimately make my sunburst effct.

These were the settings I used under the polar coordinates menu.

And this is what it came out as, but something was missing. I remember adding a film grain effect to the background of my last design and I felt that would be interesting to see how that went so I did the same with this.

I used these settings under the film grain effect to get my desired look.

This is what I achieved. What I liked about the addition of the film grain effect is that it made it look, not only a bit older and unique, but made the edges of the background stand out and I thought that was really interesting. I chose a more striking font for the band name to make it stand out and also chose a new album title which I think was more suiting. Furthermore, I made the lion decal a lot large and having it look like a fireball is something I was very pleased with and in order to have it unite with the text, I made sure the text was black and white also but with bold strokes surrounding the text.