Designing the Back of my Direct Mail. Part one.

I began designing the back of the Direct mail (DM) first at it is going to be the same on each of my designs.

When I stated this process I had the idea of creating the border of the DM using a range of CD’s Vinyl and tapes (See Below) and having the British music experience logo in the centre with the typography reading ‘Find Answers at:’ with a link to the website.
I decided to take photographs of the vinyl records ect that I have and then put them into Photoshop and extract the image from the background using the lasso tool. I used this process and began layering the back ground. Though I originally liked this idea when I saw it coming together on the page I didn’t think it worked well. The images began to distract away from the typography dominating the page. At this point I decided to change the design alltogether.

When taking the shots of the records I also took shots of the artworks as I found that the album artwork worked really well in expressing different decades of music. I extracted these images using the quick selection tool and also corrected some common faults I found in them such as noise.

Screen cap of reducing Noise.  

I began layering these images on top of each, using different size images to highlight iconic artwork.
When finished I didn’t think that the outcome looked professional enough. Some of the ‘cutting out’ was a little rough and the lighting wasn’t great on some of the images. (right)
To correct this I took new images. Instead of taking individual image of each piece of artwork and editing them in Photoshop, I overlapped the artwork discs and vinyl before I took the photo (see left) This meant that each photo had the same lighting and quality throughout and looked allround more professional.

When putting this into Photoshop I arranged the image to fit my A5 page in a way I wanted. I did find that it was too predominant on the page and the typography would not so up. To fix this I added another plain white layer behind it and changed the photo’s layer style to ‘overlay’. I then changed the bottom layers opacity to make the photo layer slightly muted.