Assignment: After seeing this done many times, I finally decided to give the project “An Album Cover” a go.  Very interesting concept that has you taking a band name, album title, and cover image all from random sources and putting them together in your own way. Assignment could’ve benefited from a more creative name though I think

Process: I went to the Wikipedia, Quotations Page, and Flickr to get Los Angeles Fashion Week, ‘wrote some blues’, and a scenic countryside pic respectively. I was surprised how well everything came together, I really liked the band name I got. Instead of using the full “Los Angeles Fashion Week” phrase, I shortened it to “L.A. Fashion Week” which sounds much better and more modern. Maybe something that an indie band might choose to be ironic or something.

The album name was a bit trickier, as the full quote I got was:

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. – Duke Ellington

We were instructed to take the last 4 or 5 words, but “Pout and wrote some blues” didn’t sound that appealing to me (even if I changed wrote to write) so I decided to just grab those last 3 words and name the release “Wrote some blues”.

Then… I had to open GIMP and put all of these into the cover. Since I already had the album image, the most difficult thing to do was choose appropriate fonts for everything.  For ‘L.A.’ I chose a font that I felt looked like an old private investigator sort of font (Niagra Engraved), but then mixed it with a nice cursive font to contrast (Pristina). The album title got stuck up top and is much smaller and in black to hopefully identify it as the title, not the band name. Chose another cursive font, but one which was slightly more personal and imperfect than the one chosen for ‘Fashion Week’. I also added the ‘Drop Shadow’ filter to all three bits of text, although I would’ve liked to see the effect come out stronger.  At home my laptop has a stronger drop shadow script installed that I would’ve benefited from.

Story: L.A. Fashion Week is an indie band from Oklahoma.  The band has three members, Travis Shoren (lead singer), Lindie Johnson (bass), and Aaron Schwartz. They’ve never been to Los Angeles, but continue to play at local venues and bars with dreams of someday making a MySpace band page.

I’d say this is a great DS106 assignment and I feel pretty lucky that my three elements fit together pretty nicely.  Was very fun to do

– Paul