Magazine Advertisement

I haven't finished my advert yet, but I have made two versions of it. I like both of them, but I prefer the black and white version. I feel that it fits better with the theme of looking back in time like the music video is. I tried to use an image that would link to the music video. I chose this image as it was taken on my holiday in the summer and thought it is a good reflection of how some people spend their summers. For the digipak, I might use both versions of the image because I like how the contrast of images looks on existing products and I would like to try and do that with my own work.

I have put the logos of some of the places where the album can be bought/heard from. I chose these three as these are the most popular places where people go to get music. All the logos are quite bright so I changed their opacity to 50% and them gave them an outer glow to make them not look like they are stuck on.

I have made further changes to my magazine advert as it didn't really link to my music video as much as I wanted it to. 

I have moved some of the text around so that I could make my changes. I moved the logo, band name and date up and moved the website down. I added a star rating and the image of the Playmobil figures I used. I did this to show they are all part of the same product.

Record Label Logo

These are some of the existing record label logos. From looking at them, I can see that most of them are black and white. A lot of them are circular too. I think the ones that contain an image look better than those that are just writing. The two logos that I really like are:

I would like to try and make my record label logo similar to these two in that it will be in a circle and will be black and white. Out of the two logos, I prefer the ISLAND one as I like how the palm tree is cut out of the circle.

This is the logo I created on Photoshop for 'Tallett Records'. I did this by using the rectangle and ellipse tools. 

I then made them black and white as I liked to monochrome record label logos. I wanted my logo to be really simple with no text. I really liked how the other logos had the black circle then white cut outs. That's why I made my logo like this. Like the 'Finding Red' and 'Reckless', I have changed the opacity.

Once I made my record label logo, I had a look at who would distribute my music. To find this out, I looked at who distributes Bryan Adam's music.

He is signed to Universal and Polydor. I had a look at Universal as I have heard of it before and found that it has a distributor called 'Universal Music Distribution'. I had a look at the other artists signed to this label to see if this would be the best label to distribute my music.

From this, I could see that Universal distributes a lot of different types of music, so I think this would be the best distributor.

Fonts on my advert

For the album name 'Reckless', I chose the font Orator Std because I really how this font looked in front of my background.

I have it placed in the middle of my advert for now until I decide where I want it. I will know this once I have some more text/images on it.

For the name of my band, I chose the name 'Finding Red' as I like how it sounds and I already had an idea of how I wanted the text to look. The font I chose for the band name is called Perpetua Titling MT. 

I made the font bold as this is conventional. I made the letter 'F' a little bit bigger than the rest of the word finding. I think it looks better with the first letter being bigger than the rest of the word. I used the same text for the word 'Red' and actually made the changed the word so that it was written in red too. I used the eraser to remove the middle part of the letter 'E' and replaced it with a circle. I also put the word red on a side so it looked more like a band logo than a title. I'm really happy with how the band name looks.

I have outlined the advert as I haven't decided how I am going to fill the corners of the advert yet. This is how it looks so far. I still have a lot more information to add yet.

I have used the same font as the word 'Reckless' because I really like it. I have made it smaller and put it further down the poster. 

I did the same for the word 'Reckless'.

I have decided to put a website at the bottom of the advert. I got this idea from The Killers 'Day & Age' magazine advert.

I like the idea of having the band's website on the poster as this means the audience can be more involved. It gives them more than just an advert to look at.

Advert Background

For the background of my advert, I am using an image I took while on holiday. This is the original image.

I chose to use this image as I really like the mountains in the background with the bit of tree in the top left corner. I wanted to use it as the background but I didn't like how it looked before I edited it. I decided to make the original image into a sphere as I wanted to create a fish-eye/blurred effect. 

I used the above video tutorial to help me make my image into a sphere.

This is how my image looked once I had edited it. 

Inspiration for my Advert

Inspiration For My Digipak

Bryan Adams Album Covers, Motif & Continuity

These are all of Bryan Adams' album covers. Most of the albums have very minimal colour. The only ones that really have colour on them are his first album which is purple and his album titled '18 til I die'. A theme that most of the album covers share is that they have his guitar on the cover. This is because this is the instrument he plays in all of his songs and is the instrument he is known for playing. Something they all have in common is they have Bryan Adams on the front. Some artists choose to not appear on the front of their album covers. But he is on the front of all of his. This is probably because it is just him. When it is a bands album, they are less likely to use an image of them on the album covers and instead design an artwork. All the album covers are quite minimalistic in terms of what is on them, on most of his album covers it it just him, there are only a couple of exceptions. But even the exceptions make it clear that it is his album by making him the focus of the cover.

All of his album covers, excluding his first one, have his name in capital letters. This could be considered as his logo. His 'logo' always appears at the top of the album cover as this is the first place people will look when they are looking at CD's in a music shop. It is also conventional to have the name at the top. He doesn't really have a motif as such, the guitar could be considered as a motif but it isn't consistent on all of his album covers but does appear on most of them. He is always carrying the guitar in some way. This can also be for continuity because in a lot of his videos, there are clips of him playing his guitar. He has the guitars on the album covers so they relate to the music videos to the songs on that album.  Another motif could be the fact that most of the covers are black and white. They are done in this colour scheme so that the artist is the main focus of the cover. If it is brightly coloured, it takes the attention away from the artist.