Ancillary Text Production

At this point in the production of my front cover, I had taken the images which I intended to use for my front cover. These felt reasonably fitting due to the themes of Radiohead's album OK Computer in which this song features on. I took photos of a river which is based in the town of Driffield (where the music video is filmed), I found that these reflected the imagery that the song gives upon listening. Once these images were decided on, I proceeded to edit the front cover which is shown on another post. In the image shown above, I began editing the image by creating multiple layers on Adobe Photoshop. From doing this, I created a distorted image which gives an uneasy impression upon seeing the river.

From assessing other artwork from similar bands and the images which I had taken for the ancillary texts, I decided that without editing, this would be a far too bland picture to use for a front cover. With that said, there is too much which draws the viewers eye as a normal photograph would. The cover needs to be somewhat abstract in order to stand out to an audience more; therefore, this blurry effect seemed appropriate. To create the blurry effect, I duplicated the image several times and altered the opacity so that each image had a different amount of visibility. The original artwork to OK Computer does not use any photographs as it is an abstract painting (which hints at the themes of technology getting too far ahead of itself), yet I aimed to merge the modern day alternative rock stereotypes of cover art with Radiohead's abstract form of art.

I believe that font is a very important part of advertising the band's image (a metal band will use a messy logo, hardcore bands use graffiti fonts), therefore it took a long time to track down a suitable font for the front cover. I used a website named 'dafont.com' where creators of the fonts allow the public to download them for personal use. This site features a large selection of fonts ranging from genres and styles, where I chose Blue Chucks as it seemed to go with the image in the background. The wavey typing appeared to work well with the blurry effect which I had given the photograph in the background.

The Adobe Photoshop that I have used is CS4, this limits the capabilities of editing fonts in with images. As a result of this, I had to print screen the original text and use Paint to invert the colours from black to white to edit the text as an image. I found this easier as I could reposition and edit the text with more ease (although this technique can be confusing due to the amount of layers in Photoshop). Once the correct position had been chosen, I used the colour options to select 'Linear Dodge' which enabled the text to sit nicely in front of the image without any borders or colours in excess.