The document describes the steps taken to design a digipak album cover. It began with a simple black background in Photoshop Elements. A dark logo was created and placed on the cover using lens flare, polar coordinate reversal, and rotation. Band and album text were added in different colors on separate layers and blurred for effect. Finally, a gradient was added to the background to imply a light source. The advertisement design followed similar steps but with additional text and a stained glass filter effect on the background.

1. The digipak started out as nothing more than a simple black background that
had been created in Adobe Photoshop Elements – through the use of the fill tool
(see image above). The decision to make the background dark was because of the
design of other covers of albums from the same or similar genres of the song that
we had chosen. They typically had a dark background, with the musician’s name
or logo in the foreground.
The image above is the background with the logo that we had created now in
place on the digipak. The logo was created by using lens flare and then reversing
the polar coordinates and then copy and pasting three times and rotating 90
degrees each time, to get it into place. The same was done with the coloured
pieces in the centre only this time, colour was applied.

2. The next step in creating the cover was the addition of the band and album name.
These were created through using the text tool typing out the band and album
name, both in different colours. The selecting the pixels and creating two new
layers, in the first layer the fill tool was used to fill the text in white, the same
was done on the second layer only this time in black. Deselecting the text and
going back to the original text layer, I then used the Gaussian blur tool (10.0) on
the text. The same this was done on the white layer only this time the blur was
set to 5, then the black layer was simply set to ‘overlay’.
The final step in the creation of the digipak cover was adding a blur effect to the
logo, Gaussian blur (5.0). And lastly using the gradient tool on the background, to
create an effect of light coming up from the bottom of the image.

3. The creation of the advertisement was mostly the same, only with some more
text added in. The creation of the additional text was done in the same way as on
the digipak cover, only using a different colour for the initial text layer. Another
change was made to the background for the advert, this was the use of the
‘stained glass’ filter effect. The cell size was set to 2, the border thickness to 1
and the light intensity to 10, to give the background the effect that is currently
seen above.