Ancillary Task 2 : Development

Here are some print screens to depict the process of creating the album poster for my coursework. You can see the original images I took here.

As the first step of creating my album poster, I altered the settings of the photo to decrease the saturation to make it look more black and white to fit in with the silent film style of my music video, adding continuity throughout all my products. I also changed the exposure and the white to make the striped to stand out to emphasis the cop and robber theme. I chose this picture as I think it is unique and would catch people’s attention, which from my research is important when making an effective music poster. I like it as well because the window has bars, connoting to prisons and fitting in with the theme. It also uses the cast of my music video, which adds to continuity.

Then I added a film grain filter to see if it would have the same effect as that of which you see within silent film, but after some deliberation I decided that it distorted the original image too much as it decreased the clarity of the photograph, so did not include it in the end design.

The next step was to add the band name as this is a crucial aspect of advertisement within the album poster.  The first font I tried was Harlow Solid Italic, as I thought this might have an old fashioned effect due to the style. However, once I put it over the image I felt like it didn’t really fit with the rest of the poster that well, so decided to look for a different font.

The next font I tried Rosewood std Regular as this seemed to have the elaborate effect that I was looking for to fit in with the silent film style theme of the music video. I felt this font fitted far better than the previous, so decided to go forward with it for the development of the poster. I then changed the color of the text to white so you could read it more clearly and changed the opacity so it fitted in my seamlessly with the image.

The next aspect was to add the name of the song that I did my music video to, as that is also an important part of advertisement. I decided to go for a different font as it would make the poster more versatile. The font I chose was Stencil Std as it has the effect of looking like prison style writing which would fit in with the theme of sops and robbers. I then also changed it white and decreased the opacity again so it would fit with the text above. In my research people said the typography was important so I made sure to make it was clear and fitting to the style to abide people’s opinion on what makes a good poster.

The next step I took was to add the release date as within my research people said this was important information, but should not distract from the other aspects of the poster so I made it smaller and in the bottom corner as then it is more discrete. I used the same font as the song name to add to continuity, and thought the use of the word ‘released’ could be a fun play on words as it is like they have been released from prison. I decided not to add any social media or reviews on the poster as my research suggested people did not think this would be useful on a poster, and may even make it less effective.

As the final stage of my development, i added music platform icons along the bottom to notify the consumer of the fact it is a music video, so they can be clear the product is linked to the music industry, so they know what they would be purchasing. Furthermore, they can then know where to find the actual product from this advertisement, making it more effective.