An Album Cover: Create an album cover to a fictional band.

Following the assignment’s directions, I generated the following:
Band Name: Philipine Legislative Election, 1946
Album Title: “Save what you choose to impose” (Which comes from Alan Moore’s Watchmen. The full quote is, “Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.”)
Album Image: “nightways” by Flickr user brian hefele

Here’s what I came up with after several hours of trial and error:

Preparing to go platinum

Click here to see this image on Flickr.

It’s got a real grunge or rap feel to it, which wasn’t intentional. It just kind of went that way. I wanted to stretch myself in both Photoshop and graphic design, so I tried mixing texture and colors, messed around with filters and just about everything I could think of. Oh, and also the colors. I’m terrible at picking out matching/appropriate colors. Thank goodness for my trusty color wheel. I didn’t go into the project with a plan in mind, and it resulted in a hefty amount of work. Next time, I’d like to have a picture or end result in my head before I get to it.

I visited dafont.com, where I picked out some Horror fonts.

The most difficult part of this was finding a place for the band name, and the right font. It needed to match the grunge of the album title, but it couldn’t be too similar or it would all look the same. Photoshop doesn’t do much in the way of grunge and dirty fonts, but I finally settled on the one you see now.

Maybe I’ll make a little video showing you all the layers and the settings I worked with to create this thing.

I’m not completely happy with it the way it looks, but I’m not repelled by it, either.