unit 30 digital graphics · web view2017. 7. 18. · unit 30 - 1 digital graphicsassignment 1liam...

Saffron Walden County High SchoolLiam Arnold

Unit 30 Digital graphics

Assignment 1

Unit 30 - 1 Digital Graphics Assignment 1 Liam Arnold

Contents Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2

Development of products......................................................................................................................2

Album Cover......................................................................................................................................2

Logo...................................................................................................................................................3

Disk sticker.........................................................................................................................................3

Feedback...............................................................................................................................................3

Album Cover..........................................................................................................................................4

Logo...................................................................................................................................................4

Disk sticker.........................................................................................................................................4

Justification Decisions............................................................................................................................5

Choice of software.............................................................................................................................5

File format.........................................................................................................................................5

Resolution..........................................................................................................................................6

Colour depth......................................................................................................................................6


IntroductionMy task was to create a Logo, CD cover and CD case insert. I decided to create these in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. I decided to create these in illustrator as this program offers the widest amount of vector tools and is the best program for creating logos. I used a large variety of tools but mainly used the pen tool to create the various elements.

To create my products, I took inspiration from The Beatles album cover.

Development of productsAlbum CoverI decided to create my album cover in Adobe Fireworks, I decided to do this as Fireworks has a good choice and variety of vector tools. Throughout the production of my album cover I mainly used the ‘pen tool’ and occasionally the rectangle tool. The canvas I created was 600 pixels by 600 pixels. I used this canvas size originally to create 2 documents. The front and the back of the album cover. I then created a spine for the cover (100px X 600px) and then added the 3 sections together on one canvas to make the whole cover.

To start off the cover I decided to start with the dark grey road and plain background. To create this, I started by making the canvas background a light blue and then simply drew a triangle and distorted the edges to fill the canvas. I then moved onto creating the white lines and zebra crossing. To create these, I used the pen tool to create white rectangles and changed the sizes of them and the angles to add a sense of perspective. To create the line going up the road I simply copy and pasted the white rectangles are gradually decreased the size to add perspective.

Creating the curb and the car was fairly simple as I simply drew the curb on the left hand side of the road using the pen tool. I created a smaller rectangle and made it black to symbolise the edge of the curb and then grouped these and reflected them to make the other side of the curb. To create the car, I used a combination of the pen tool and the line tool to create both the body and the wheels of the car.

I then created the houses using the pen tool to make an outline of a house. I then added a roof and added the door and windows. I made the roof slightly darker than the front of the houses colour to add some

shadowing.

I then used the text tool to add the text on the front and back of the album. I used the font Plantagenet Cherokee.

I then decided to add some images of insects to fit in with the theme of the album cover and would also make the cover seem less plain. I decided to make the images clipart so that they met the aesthetic and general theme of the rest of the cover.

Finished Album Cover


Throughout the development of the album cover I decided to mainly use the pen tool. I decided to do this as with the pen tool you can very easily create any form of shape with straight edges. As all of the shapes were going to have a sense of perspective to them (i.e. the houses road etc.) I decided it would be easier to create these with the pen tool instead of manipulating existing shapes. For the creation of the houses I simply drew 2 parallel lines coming off of the road and then an angled roof which would meet the same as the road. I then simply added the flat roofs onto the buildings and then grouped the 2 objects. Once this was done I could simply copy and paste the buildings onto the areas around the road. Once I was putting the buildings onto the opposite side all I had to do was put the objects into the correct position and then reflect them so it would fit onto the opposite side.

LogoTo create the logo of the band I used Adobe Photoshop as this programme is arguably the best for compiling various images together. I decided to add two of the insects to a banner and add the text I already had from the album cover. I created a document at 600x100 pixels. I then added a blue background to this document which covered the whole document. I then added some text (in the same font as the album cover) and 2 clipart images of insects.

Disk stickerTo create the sticker, I created a document at 300x300 Pixels. I decide to use Adobe Illustrator to create the disk sticker. I decided to use this program as you can easily add effects to products and overlay images easily on top of each other on a canvas. I then drew a large circle from the centre of the canvas. To do this is selected the ellipsis tool then went to the middle of the canvas and held the ALT and SHIFT Key. This then creates a circle that expands from the centre with an evenly expanding circumference to make a perfect circle. I then did this again but with a smaller circle to create the hole in the middle of the disk. I then added the text from my logo and also from the album cover along with the insect images. To create the background effect, I added a dark blue fill to the circle and then used the gradient tool with a radial gradient setting to add the circular blur to the background.

FeedbackTo gather feedback, I made questionnaires for all of my products. These questionnaires all had 5 to 6 questions based on the products specifically. These question included things such as overall opinions of the products and suggested improvements for the designs. I had 3 separate questionnaires (one for each design). I handed 5 copies to classmates as well as 5 copies to people in year 8 (ages 13-14).

This feedback was very helpful as it gave me clear ideas on what things to improve on each design as well as ideas on which design people liked the most.

Finished First Draft



Album CoverFrom user feedback I was informed to fix the vanishing point of the houses so it looked more realistic, remove the insects and add actual song names. I agreed with all of this feedback as I decided that these were suitable improvements to make and would greatly improve my design.

From this feedback I decided to amend the vanishing point and add parody names for the songs on the album. To amend the vanishing point, I added some red lines leaving at a 45° angle from the vanishing point moving to the edge of the canvas. This helped as it then clearly showed me where the roofs of the buildings needed to be to have an exact perspective. I alternated the heights of some of the buildings but had the correct angle to try and make it seem more realistic as otherwise it would seem as if the buildings all perfectly got shorter and shorter. I decided to remove the cartoon insect’s ad from user feedback it was suggested that it made the album cover seem unprofessional and made it seem as if they were there simply for the sake of having something there.

LogoFrom user feedback I was told to remove the insects as they didn’t fit with the rest of the design. I decided that this was appropriate as I also didn’t really like the fact that the insects were there.

I also decided to change the font to the actual Beatles font as it fits with the design more and makes the logo look a lot more effective. To find the Beatles font I managed to find a template on the website Dafont. I then had to snipping tool the image and remove the white background in Adobe Photoshop. To do this I used the quick selection tool to remove the majority of the white. I then used the magic wand tool to remove smaller sections of white and then on some areas I used the eraser to remove very small sections of white.

Disk stickerFrom feedback I was advised that the design seemed too plain and basic. I agreed with this as the design seemed rushed and as if little effort was put into it.

I decided to change the effects that I had put onto the sticker so that it was more than just a simple blur. I also added a black outline around the whole circumference of the sticker. I then decided to change the font colour to white and contour the writing around the edge of the CD sticker.

Justification DecisionsChoice of softwareVector graphics are usually created in graphics packages and consist of various shapes or objects. Whereas Bitmap graphics are made up simply of coloured pixels. This means that if you were to take

Finished Album Cover

First Draft of Album Cover


Finished Logo


a picture of a beach this would be a bitmap image. Whereas if you were to graphically ‘draw’ or create a beach this would be a vector image as it has been made up of various objects.

There is many software that usually ‘specialise’ in either vector or bitmap tools. Furthermore, there are also a few packages that offer a variety of both bitmap and vector tools.

For the creation of my products I decided that I would mainly need to use software that had a variety of vector tools as I would be creating all elements of my products by myself. The widely used programs for making graphics would usually be either Adobe Fireworks or Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Fireworks is mainly used for creating graphics that are a mixture of both bitmap and vector as this software offers both sets of tools. Whereas Adobe Illustrator only offers the user vector tools. However, there is a much larger variety in the tools available.

For creating my products, I decided to use a mixture of software depending on what it was I had aimed to produce. For my Album cover I realised I was going to want a software that used vector tools but then also allowed me to edit images and easily compile them onto the same canvas. This lead me to want to use a software with both bitmap and vector tools. I decided the main options I would have would be CorelDRAW and Adobe Fireworks. I decided to use Fireworks as Corel is used to create a lot more professional products which are usually design for things such as advertisements or merchandise. Corel is also a much more complicated program to use. Therefore, I decided to use Fireworks.

File formatThe main 2 file formats that would be used for images would be either PNG (Portable Network Graphics) and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group). PNG is a raster graphics format. That was created as an improved replacement for the Graphics interchange format (GIF). JPEG is a file format that is usually used to compress digital images. The ‘amount’ of compression can be altered. Depending how much the file is compressed will alter the overall quality of the final saved images. The quality of the image will also affect how big the file size is. If the image is high quality the file will be larger than if the quality is a lot lower.

For my created graphics I decided to use the PNG file format. This is because the PNG format does not compress the file as much as the JPEG format does. Also with the JPG format due to the smaller amount of compression the file often looks a lot clearer and will often show the detail a lot more successfully.

to the sides is my album cover saved as a JPEG and a PNG. The overall quality does not seem to be that much different. However, there are clear differences in quality where the ‘object’ is black. For example, the text on both appears very different. On the JPG the

text seems to be a lot greyer and seems slightly blurry whereas on the PNG copy the text seems a lot more ‘crisp’ and clearer.

Saved as a PNG formatSaved as a JPEG format


ResolutionImage resolution refers to the number of pixels a device can handle. This is calculated by the amount of pixels captured, by height and length, then multiplied together, to give the number of pixels the device can handle.

For example, a standard monitor display is 1080p (1920x1020). This will contain a total of 1,958,400 pixels. This means that a display of 1080p can handle a total of 1,958,400 pixels and cannot display anymore.

Colour depthColour depth or bit depth often refers to the number of ‘bits’ used to indicate the colour of a single pixel. It is literally the term to describe the amount of colour used. 16-bit colour depth will be referred to as ‘high colour’, 24 bit is ‘true colour’.

All of the products I created where created in 32-bit. This is the biggest colour depth that Illustrator lets you export an image as. The smallest being 8-bit. I decided to save the products as 32-bit as this would create the best quality image. If I had saved the image as any other bit depth you could see a difference in the quality once you zoomed into the image. Also when it comes to file size there is also not too much of a difference in size of the files. When I saved my cd sticker as an 8-bit image the file size was 43KB. Whereas when it was saved as 32-bit the file size was 152KB.

unit 30 digital graphics · web view2017. 7. 18. · unit 30 - 1 digital graphicsassignment 1liam...

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