Will's Evaluation

Unit 3 Evaluation

1) Describe your strengths and weaknesses in detail. Talk about working as
part of a team and independently.

Working in a group allowed each person to work stress free, with no extra work built on top. Each person was assigned a role with an equal amounts of work involved, this allowed each person to work in their own space & freely. As an individual I have a great knowledge of Photoshop & how to make a product look authentic & like a real product, these set of skills helped greatly in the final product and throughout the project. Joe also carried a similar set of skills & also assisted in inspiration as well as most written work. This side of work could be looked at as ‘not as fun’, which is true, but it helped complete the project fully, quickly & efficiently. In the team I contributed the graphics & some written work, Joe contributed written work & some graphics, this is an even spread. If we both worked lots on the graphics but little on the written work the product wouldn’t have been completed as it had been. Some weaknesses would have to be I am only comfortable with working with people I know.


2) Provide a detailed review of your finished product giving information
about research, planning, filming and editing.

Our final product was a full design & plan of a CD, which includes a front & back cover, an inside booklet (fold out poster) and an actual design for the CD. The first step for our product was to collect images that could be used. I collected; Fractal Packs off DeviantArt for effects, depth & flow; some pictures of city streets & night lights as well as pictures of the sky & a few Photoshop brushes also for effects & depth. Then we started to draft our ideas using pencil & paper as well as using Photoshop, using Photoshop helped as we could get the idea out more clearer with a better knowledge of what was needed. Then we looked at other album covers, mainly from the 90’s and looked for characteristics that defined the cover, such as a dark, muddy looking surround of the focal. After all our drafts & planning was done, we proceeded to work on the final product: a CD front & back cover, an inside booklet & a design for the CD. The booklet was planned to be a poster, but if we were to do it again we’d include something like the lyrics on the flip. When we finished, about a week later, we organised the posts in order of appearance and posted them on the blog. One problem was the macs fault, when I tried saving a project (the inside booklet), it froze and I hadn’t saved it so I had to redo it all over again, which didn’t turn out as good. This is a screenshot of what it looked like.




3) Next identify a range of techniques that you used and give a clear explanation of why you used them.

One of the techniques I used were fractals as effects. I downloaded some packs of fractals off DeviantArt, and placed them in the project. I set the layer to either Screen or Lighten, this took out the shadows in the layer & only showed the highlights, which allowed me to create depth and keep the design from looking too empty. I also downloaded several Photoshop brushes, as well as using fonts from dafont, this helped me to create an authentic looking product, with easy to access tools. I also used several Photoshop effects & filters such as Gradient Maps, High Pass, Contrast, Exposure, Sharpen & Blur. I used these filters/effects to make it look better, if a background image was too in focus I could darken & blur it out. Having the focal the only thing un-blurred created depth.