CD Cover Front
Back Cover
For this project, I was to design a professional looking CD Cover, front and back. For a while I was mulling over what I could do, but I knew I wanted to do a personalized compilation album of some kind. Well, it didn't hit me until this project was almost due, but I had a chance to cross over some of what I've learned in my other class. I am concurrently taking a jazz music history class which I happen to be enjoying very much. After studying for my second test in that class, which includes a song and artist identification listening portion, I constantly had many jazz songs stuck in my head. Then I realized since it was already on my mind, I might as well make a jazz themed CD.
I initially had thoughts to do a throwback type of album cover from the 40's or 50's which would have been really neat, or even a cover design that included pictures of performers. Since all I had in my head was the music, most of it without lyrics, I figured I could go with a strictly music based theme meaning including symbols and instruments, but no people. Also, by doing this, I consciously made the decision to keep the colors strickly black and white which resembles much of jazz in many ways. I went with black as the background color in order to give it the sense of a shiny or glossy piano black. I did not draw or create any of the original images as I wish I was good enough to do so. However, I was able to invert the colors and arrange the images in a way that I thought fit well together. I intentionally picked the instruments that typically make up a jazz quintet - trumpet, saxaphone, bass, piano - but I could not figure out how to include the drumset so I left it out.
I picked the title based on the songs I was including on the album, and since all of them are essential listening to understanding the progress and history of jazz over the decades, I figured I might as well treat them as lessons. The font I picked is called "Monotype Corsiva". To me it fit best and really matches the way the music notes and symbols look. Particularly, you can really see a resemblance in the way that the round bulb like features at the end of the "L", "J", and "z" characters match the bulb-like features in the bottom of the treble clef staff symbol and the black "s" curves on the bass instrument. The underline is actually a thin strait brush stroke because that particular font does not have an italic or bold form, only regular, so I had to draw it in. In the bottom left corner I ripped off the Sony BMG logo in order to make it look a little more official.
On the back cover, which I admit is a bit more plain than I wanted it, I continued the theme over from the front cover by placing a bending music staff at the top left edge. I placed the title again in the top right. I used the default "Myriad Pro" font to list the music tracks because I thought it looked pretty good. I bolded the Song title and track time while leaving the artist regular. I should have made the artist names about 1 or 2 points smaller than the track title and time though. I used the same font, albeit much smaller, for the copyright info at the bottom left. I wasn't sure exactly what to put so I typed in exactly what was on my Sony published jazz textbook CD set. I again included the Sony BMG logo to the right and took a generic barcode image and placed it in the bottom right corner where they usually go. I tried my best to have everything lined up properly to give it a subtle cleanliness to it.
Anyways, I probably typed way too much describing this, but I figured while it was fresh on my mind, I might as well, if nothing else as a reminder to myself. To finish this post, I will include all of the original image components below so you can see what I chose to work with and compare it with the final composite image.
