SO, as per my final project, I delved deep into the ds106.us site and found an interesting assignment I wanted to tackle this week, “An Album Cover“.

The task: make a cool album cover.

The challenge: the title of the band, album, and picture for the cover are all random.

This sounded pretty cool to me (and very random), and I was interested to see what random names/titles/pictures I would have to work with for this assignment.

Apparently there is a special wiki operator that will bring you to a random article, and I used it to find the name of my band, “Trulla Bluff“.

Next up, the album title.  To randomly acquire this essential part of my album cover, I head over to Quotations Page, and as instructed, took the last four to five words from the last quote for the title.  This one was a bit weird.  I wound up with a very interesting sub-quote, “cynicism is what follows,” (the quote can be found here) which seems like a pretty cool outcome for such a random exercise. The last five words of the second-to-last quote were “The refill contained the antidote” (it can be found here)… I’m glad I didn’t end up with that one.

After that, the last step was to find an interesting album cover, conveniently taken from flickr’s Last 7 Days of Interingness. I would up with this pretty cool picture of a dock in Germany, Ammersee by Robert Mehlan.

NOW, to compile the bits of randomness. For this, I headed over to Photoshop, and got down to business.  Que the montage music…

After playing with image effects, layer shadows, outer glows, different fonts, and font sizes, etc., here is the final product:

So, there it is, my imaginary random band’s debut random imaginary album.

Overall, I thought this assignment was a pretty nice assignment in using what you’re given, and working random bits of information into something that is your own, and that’s what ds106 is all about.