Close, yet far...

With only 2 weeks left to go I'm feeling an enormous sense of achievement. Only it looked unlikely that I was going to complete the A7 assignment having fallen behind due to illness and then not taking advantage of the Easter break to catch up again. However with the support of my tutor and friends I'm pleased to say that I've turned things around. With just 2 weeks of the assignment I find myself in a good position to complete the assignment not only on time but also with work I can be proud of.

Now that I've caught up I'm really beginning to enjoy this assignment again. Re-imagining CD artwork, logos and designing magazine adverts amongst the other tasks, have proved to be a great challenge.

My release was Kangding Ray's Automne Fold album and whilst not ordinarily a genre I'd listen too (I'm mostly a punk fan) I really enjoyed the albums minimalist electronica sound.

This helped a great deal when I was coming up with the concept for the album's digipak artwork:

http://www.ian-thompson.org.uk/a7/digipak_outer_final.pdf

http://http//www.ian-thompson.org.uk/a7/digipak_inner_final.pdf

The concept was simple: Automne is French for Autumn, so I decided to use some photos which i took at Hatfield Forest as the starting point and then using Photoshop to manipulate the images and to introduce warm, autumnal colours.

As my knowledge of Photoshop techniques is not as advanced as other members of the group, at times it was frustrating when trying to recreate the imagery from my designs onto the screen. Having said that I'm really pleased with the results and can't wait to recieve the postcards we ordered from Moo:

These were designed as another method of presenting our artwork. For my postcards I opted to use the image from the front cover and the inner of the digipak. I used the inner image rather than the back cover as I simply felt it was a more interesting image.

Now I've just got to get cracking on with the Wire advert and web interface and hopefully finish the year with a bang!