Editing at Home:

I downloaded the Photoshop Trial on my computer to allow myself more time to complete my print products, as it takes quite a while to create as I have to cut around, shade in and do other technical things to achieve the look I want, making each part quite complicated.

I couldn't do the official print products at home, so instead I decided to work on the second front cover. For my back cover, I initially planned to have a small image of a second album, which was the 'official' full album of the group. This seemed conventional of single albums that were released in the 90s and was used on my Brownstone case studies back cover. I had planned it on my first back cover:

However I didn't think I would have the time to create it, so scrapped it for my second, official back cover. Nevertheless, I decided to try and do one and test out the Photoshop trial.

I started off by creating a basic template, outlining the page with black rectangles somewhat similar to the way I did with my official front cover but obviously a different colour. I then added the group name - I had planned to place it around the edges, inside the black rectangles similar to how I styled by proper front cover however I ended up placing it like this:

I continued on with the template, adding thinner pink rectangles into the black ones, sticking to the colour scheme and theme of the first cover. There were issues with making the lines meet correctly, so I ended up shading in the pink sides to make them meet:

After this, I decided to add the title of the album. Our song is called Side Crush but that is already the name on the advert, and the album is called Side2Side - I did not want to name the album after one of these, since it was meant to be the separate full album. I looked up songs from each of the artists, and then came to the decision to use the name 'Crush on You' taken from the title of Lil Cease and Lil Kim's 1996 hit track. I chose this title because 1 - I felt like it linked to the girl group theme, as well as the colour scheme of pink as it connotes romance, cuteness and femininity. 2 - because this is the backing track to Side Crush so it still links to the other products, just not too obviously. In terms of typography, I decided to use the colour pink for the word Crush due to the connotations linking directly to the meaning of having a crush on someone. I also used it on the T in MTB to create a styling link between the two pieces of writing. I chose a simple, bold font as I wanted it to stand out but not be too full and fancy:


I then moved onto the background as I did not want it to be white. I coloured it in many variations of pink and purple finally sticking to this, as I felt it again fit the theme:

However I still felt that it was quite plain, so I decided to add a graffiti background to it. I chose to use graffiti as I felt that I had lacked the use of it in my actual, print products. The advert, and back cover largely link to the Clueless theme of the actual song, overlooking the r&b and hip hop 90's theme that I was going for with the girl group - the graffiti is conventional of hip hop and therefore ties back into that. Pictures of graffiti from Southbank was used, however I felt that it was too harsh as the background so I lowered the opacity to 70%:

Then, I wanted to add a picture to see how it looked on the background. I chose an image from the photoshoot, used the Magic Wand tool to cut around it and added it on. I felt like adding a picture would go, but not that particular one as the chair legs looked weird to me:


From this, I looked through pictures taken during filming and in the studio to go on the front, going through various ones. I started with the ones taken during filming in Southbank. The images were good, however they were hard to cut around due to the detailed background:

To cut around it, it had to be in extreme detail to make sure every last part was gone:

I was unable to use the brush tool to cover it as I had previously done on my proper front cover, as the background was not a solid colour but graffiti. Because of the difficulty cutting around the Southbank pictures, the studio pictures seemed like the obvious option to use. I tried a few but ended up using the same one I used for the CD silhouette. It was easier to cut around, however still hard and complicated:


When adding the image to the template on the next tab, it somehow ended up behind the graffitti. I ended up liking this look, therefore I decided to keep it as it reminded me of the overlay from the video. I actually tried to use the same overlay effect from the video on the cover, however it came out too harsh, so I just went for the darken and opacity on 70%:


Here is the final, second front cover: