CD Cover Draft: Fox Track

This is an example of one of my CD cover drafts. The genre for this CD cover is primarily indie with a folk vibe. I looked at various different indie/folk CD covers before putting this piece together and found that the majority of them have simplistic fonts and nonchalant images - this represents the type of music because it's relaxed with a chilled ambience backing. The image I used relates to the album name because it's of a boy hugging a fox and the title is 'Fox Track'. I named the CD 'The Boy With Blood in His Lungs' because as it's an indie cover, the majority come up with a bizarre and original name for their CD's and this gives it more of an indie feel. I decided to use a simple typeface to tie in with the simple song choices and simple colour scheme.

For the CD back cover, I decided to use another simple image of a fox so that both the front and back linked together. I used simple track names that don't particularly have any relevance in conjunction with each other and was inspired by this idea from Foster the People's album, Torches. The beginning letter of every song spells out 'Fox Track' so that the album name is both on the front and back so the audience knows who's album it is from either cover. I used this specific background colour because it linked in with the colour of the image of the fox and overall, goes with the colour scheme of the album. I used the same typeface as the album name because it all ties in together with the whole album, the song titles and the colours.

This is the original image I used for the album cover. I cropped it to fit and colour picked the background colour to fill the rest of the background with the same colour. It wasn't exact so I had to blur around the edges of it. I used the eraser tool and set the opacity to 23% at 0% hardness and blurred it until the edges were no longer visible and it fit nicely in the corner of the album. For the text, I colour picked from the colours on the fox and darkened it a little bit to make it less vibrant. The text layers were two different layers and I scrolled through various texts before settling for the ones I finally did, and I moved the composition around a lot. Originally, I was planning on having the album title The Boy With Blood in His Lungs more towards the left and the album title Fox Track beside it but in bold so the audience could differentiate between the title and the artist, however when I put them side-by-side, I didn't particularly like it. I messed around with moving the text up and down and settled for it centred, with Fox Track above the album name. I finally decided to keep it like this because I thought it made the album cover and looked a lot neater and tidier than with the album name and artist name next to each other.

This is the original image I used for the back cover as it showed the fox in more detail and linked nicely in with the idea I was going for with the covers. I liked how there was a wooden effect and the fact that the fox was framed as it accentuated the image. To get this blurred like on the image on the back cover, I used the eraser tool again, set at the same opacity and hardness as I was using previously and removed all of the background around the oval ensuring I didn't erase the feather. I then centred it in the middle of the back cover and set the opacity to 67% so that it was blurred and moved the text over the image. I added a shadow to the text to make sure it was visible and made the first initial of every song title italic, so that whoever was viewing the album could see that it spelt Fox Track down the side. I used the colour picker tool to select the colour of the background again so that it blended in nicely with the image once I'd added various effects to it. I tried to make both the back and the front as simple as possible because upon researching indie/folk covers, I found that most were and I tried to reciprocate this with my covers.