Project 2 - 3D

Coming up:
I get distracted and create some cigarette cards, half an hour is spent cutting out biscuits on a laser cutter and I create my own album cover.

---

We move onto 3D for the next stage of this project now. Straight away we have been told that we will be creating an album cover for a band, but not a real band (yet) because where is the fun in that? No, we have all been given an band name, album name and the genre they sit in from a name generator. As you can see above, I will be working for the famous band 'Squid Mince' and their latest album 'Biscuit Tree'. Squid Mince fit in the 'Dad rock' genre of music, so I will be looking a little more into the genre and the types of album covers that tend to be used to indicate the Dad Rock genre.
In terms of limits, we won't be creating a design that will just sit on a small square on Spotify (other apps are available), no, we will be going back to a time when record albums were 12" by 12". To add a little extra element of 3D to them, the designs will actually by 12" by 12" by 12", so an entire cubic foot to play in.

So then, 'Dad Rock' wasn't an actual genre of music like I was expecting, it is more of the kind of music that the typical dad would listen to, so the kind of music that would be badly played by the bearded blokes in the pub on a Friday night, or the type of music that comes on the radio causing your dad to tap along on the steering wheel. Ironically, my dad doesn't listen to anything remotely similar to this, he listens to that rubbish that Radio 1 plays at lunch time, but let's not get bogged down with that, if anything, I would listen to this kind of music throughout the week, seeing as everyone calls me a 40 year old man trapped in a young person's body.

To give you a brief round up of what these stereotypical dads will be listening to, here are some photos of the more regular bands that come up, so we have U2, The Killers (these guys made that song that everyone screams at when it comes on that your aunties wedding), Fleetwood Mac because what dad doesn't like listening to the old F1 theme tune over and over again, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Obviously there are many more bands such as these that your dad would listen to, but these are the main ones that the majority of people would have heard of. 

They say 'never judge a book by its cover', well people who say that are just wrong. Especially in the music industry, judging a cover by its look is purely what you have to go off as back in the day you would just buy a record by what stood out on the album cover as we all love a good bit of eye candy. These are some album covers from the bands I pointed out a minute ago, and I personally recognise them all, probably more because these were always in the glove box in the car growing up but still, they stand to the thought of Dad Rock don't they.

I bought myself a few old cigarette cards the other day and while thinking about ideas for my album cover, I thought it could be cool if it comes with something collectable like them. These are just some images of what I mean as they are all nicely styled and fit the era they are from and there is a certain aesthetic when it comes to their designs. They have always been quite collectable throughout the years as the target was for you to get the full set of 50, so I would have to think of something of a smaller number when it comes to people actually collecting something from this album, unless Squid Mince plan on release 49 more albums of course!

Sticking to the collectables, here are some stamps that I thought looked quite cool on Pinterest along with some letters that i got in town the other day. These are all really cool to look at because some of them are just very aesthetically pleasing to look at. The ones that I have up on my wall on the last image all match and are part of a set which links to the idea of having something collectables. In terms of stamps, I like the ones which have more of a vector design feel to them as I find that they work really well and just look much nicer than your classic stamp design with the red and the blues.

Here are some of the band logos that fit into the Dad Rock genre. There isn't really a set style to these logos in this genre so these are all fairly different, however they are all unique and recognisable, not many are just a font, a lot of them are actually set around a normal logo or symbol which works really well. I will have to keep in mind these different designs and styles when creating my band logo as I will have to make it stand out well and be quite unique.

Here are some first sketches that I have made when thinking about the album cover box, my first idea being a magnifying glass at one end of the box and the actual record at the other side meaning that you can stand at one side and it would zoom in on the centre of the record where the logo would be. Another idea was that the record could actually sit in a frame, as this is something that many dads would do to a record once they have purchased them, because why would you listen to the music more than once when you can just hang it up and add a little decoration to the room. A few more ideas were just some random thoughts of how to add a squid to the designs to make it relate to the name of the band. One extra note to add is my last idea of having a box that contains the record, some packets of biscuits and a pack of tree seeds as it contains the objects in the album name and it means that a dad can buy it, listen to music, plant a tree, eat some biscuits and then call it a day.

While it's not to everyone's taste, I have created a quick Pinterest board with a range of new ideas to refresh my mind for this project. This is all because I have noticed that I'm trying to link all my thoughts to my band name or the album name, when realistically it is actually very rare that the eye candy is a direct link to the album or band, as this board shows. So, this tells me to go for something well out of the box, despite it having to be inside one... There are many roads to go down as it turns out then, just have to figure out which is the most scenic route before I get too far into the design process. 

After having another little think, I decided that the album cover doesn't need to relate to the band name or album name, the design just has to be eye catching. I'll go over the ideas briefly as they were just some very quick ideas which range from an apple holding an alarm clock or a plant in a bottle to a range of boxes all painted the same colour and lined up with a nice amount of white space on the side for the logo and album name. The sketches on the right were the idea of having a cigarette card of something collectable that I looked into last week but having it actually integrated into the album cover for the dads to cut out and use.

I got a new Field Notes set so I decided to start thinking about have my sketches would actually look in 3D. I don't think many of these ideas would be very realistic to make in person within a week, but the ideas are there! Before you start to moan about my poor use of perspective, you can shush only as I decided to use the squares to line it all up much easier in a way that I would be able to understand what would go where.

Here is a photo of the professional photo studio that we would be using over the next few days including a plain white, curved piece of paper and the wibbly wobbly light of heat. This was set up for us to use and take photos of any objects that we took in to play around with to start making what would sit in the box for our album cover.

As I really liked the idea of having loads of boxes lined up and painted, I collected a range of different sized boxes to see how they would look from different angles.This is a very simple idea, but I feel like they would look really cool if they were painted all the same colour.

I had a wide range of objects and was starting to just see what happens when you add different objects together and I liked the idea of having a coke bottle and some bog roll as that is the perfect combination for a dad in the late evening.

I thought why not add a biscuit tin to the due to just add something a little more random and again something that a dad enjoy while also linking back to the name of the album.

The idea of adding in the biscuits made me think of perhaps putting little package bead things filling up the biscuit tin to represent the food and then added a little sweet bag to go alongside.

Dads just love making models and there isn't a more iconic model brand than Airfix, so why not take a photo of the kit just laid out flat as I always find that they look really satisfying to look at.

This was the box to go alongside that Airfix kit as everyone can recognise the layout of the packaging and can be instantly linked to dads and there willingness to sit for hours on end to recreate the classic planes and vehicles to sit on the side to collect dust.

My favourite of the photos that I took today was of these boxes holding a Biscuit tin and a wooden Tree to directly link to the album name. The idea of these was just to be looking at some parcels that have just been opened as dads love to open parcels.

Every so often I stay in our studio for a bit longer than we need to and while I was rooting around for materials to photograph, I came across this massive sheet of A1 glossy card and thought why not turn it into a record sleeve? I went off what I could see on one I got from a charity shop, used the 12" square as a reference and just started to fold and cut my way into creating a record sleeve. The card itself is a really good quality so it already feels like one you would see in the shop or something! I will wait and see how this looks with my actual album cover over the top of it as I think it'll look awesome on a real life mockup.

Part two of getting physical, this time I decided to create the 12" by 12" by 12" box. Rather than using wood or something, I went with this flimsy card that looks like cardboard as it is something that I could be able to adjust if I needed to change it up if I did something wrong. I added in some folds stuck together with double sided tape as that was something I had on my desk and it was very strong to hold the materials together.

I felt it was about time to loop back around and start coming up with ideas for the band logo as I am fast approaching the stage where I will actually need to have it printed out. I spent about half an hour making some rough sketches of any ideas that came in mind until I filled a few pages. Some of these were based on the logo sketches I used on some original ideas in my sketchbook when I was looking into the actual box designs as they were all I had in mind at the time. I tried to play around with using some different sketch fonts, so you can see some serif typefaces too as a lot of existing bands use this style in their logos so it was worth the shot. You can also see that I had the idea of involving an actual squid into the sketches too along with a mincer to play along with the band name.

The next step is to find a suitable font then, so I have opened up Adobe Fonts to find some smart ones to download and start playing around with.

Here you can see that I have opened up Illustrator and have started to play around to create a logo for my band by using the warp tools and just positioning the type in different ways. I tried using some blur tools as well, but if I'm honest, i was a bit stuck for ideas here as they weren't looking very cool at all.

What dad doesn't own at least three Airfix kits? Exactly, they all do, and since it is quite a dad thing to own, and my genre is dad rock, would it make sense to bring a link between them? I'm not sure, but I thought it was only fair to give it a shot as these kits are very satisfying to create, from the unique blue kits where everything is delicately placed in a rectangle for you to cut out, all the way to actually sticking it all together.

This is quite a dramatic step, but I had a thought about using the Airfix logo as the band's logo, as a lot of bands like to play with copyrighting rules and to make direct references to things, so here is a direct link to the Airfix logo as it is quite recognisable, but arguably, it doesn't feel as recognisable with 'Squid Mince' written on it.

We may as well go the whole hog at this point, so I thought about recreating the iconic Airfit kit layout using my new logo as a thing to cut out of it.

Well I may come across as a bit thick here, but I only just discovered that these acorns actually plant trees, so I thought about using them in my Airfix kit to represent the 'tree' part of the album name.

These are clearly my attempts at creating the 'biscuit' side of things with this Airfix kit, so here you go. To make this, I just recreated it using the shape tools and a gradient in Illustrator.

To make it stand out a little more, I have used red text to make 'biscuit tree' stand out as much as possible against all of the other colours.

I realise that I was getting a bit too stressed about all of the different colours and I am still drifting a bit too far away from the unique Airfix kit, so I went back in and made it all blue to make it feel much more like an Airfix kit and would be able to recognised as one.

Looping back to the ideas of adding something collectable to the album, I thought why not attempt to create a cigarette card for the album. I didn't really have any ideas for this other than this tree standing on a biscuit which was from a sketch that I made for an original idea of the album cover. There is something very satisfying about old cigarette cards, but I think I will have to add some more textures or something to make it feel more like an old cigarette card.To make this, I just used the biscuit from my Airfix kit, made a fairly simplistic tree to stand over it all made from using the Pen Tool in Illustrator. I then just dragged over the new band logo to let it sit over the top of the design.

Here are some extra ideas and experiments with the cigarette card, this time we are over in Photoshop playing around with different effects and textures to see what I could come up with. My first thought was to make it black and white but after I did that, I added the logo back in full colour as I thought the colours worked much better as the biscuit beige and the tree brown felt like too much contrast and not in a good way. Naturally, I went in and added some textures and was just experimenting with the filter presets and different layer opacities. These screenshots were my favourite of the experiments, but the last one was by far my favourite. The weathered feel to the design works very well for the era that cigarette cards came from and the way the red now stands out above everything else is really quite eye catching. There is something quite German about the design, from the font being very bold and dark, to the eerie dead tree above the biscuit.

I also weirdly like the back of cigarette cards even though there isn't too much of an icandy element to it, but the text part is often quite interesting to read, so I thought why not make one for the back of my card. I went in and placed the border and the logo in the same place so that they could stand out on both sides, then I went in and added some writing about the band's history and their funny names. After adjusting some of the layout of the different parts into a way that felt easy to look at, I dragged it over into Photoshop where I added in the same textures as the front so that the front and the back of the designs would match.

Here are a couple mockups of my cigarette card designs along with some that I actually printed out. The textures on these just work really well and they look like they have lived a very long life already which is really nice to see in the real world. I think this is a really nice thing to go alongside my album cover as it is something that I have imagined every album that the band released would have a different one so it is something that all the fans (the dads) would want to collect and is just a small piece of cool design to have laying around.

Well, it is about time I start thinking about getting this kit printed off using the Laser cutter, and to do that, I have been back in Illustrator to make every shape a Stroke rather than a Fill, and to move everything around to fill up a little white space and to make it feel more like an actual Airfix kit.

Here, I have been going in and making sure that everything will be able to be cut out correctly, so making sure there are no lines where there shouldn't be, which could result in losing key parts to the design once it is cut out of the Laser Cutter.

While I wait to get that all cut off in the Laser Cutter, I decided to print off a little Vinyl centrepiece for my album cover to make the real world mockup feel that much more believable.

Here we go then, I sent across my design to be cut off, and while I sat down and watched it do its work for about 25 minutes, I ended up having a really smart cut out of my Airfix kit and it came out really nicely, and most importantly, there were no pieces missing or cut off by accident which is what we like to see!

I stopped off at Wilko this morning and bought myself some paint testers. While these were made for you to test out on your living room walls, the tester kits actually come in really handy if you wanted to try painting something small, so I used this one to slowly and carefully paint over my kit without damaging it, and once it was finished, I thought it looked really smart. Notice that I didn't paint the back of the sides, this is purely so it doesn't fade away into the background as I could imagine it seeping away into the light background, which is why the shadows look really dark in these images.

It is about time I make a start on making the actual box for this project I guess, so I would some old pieces of materials from around the studio which were almost like a really thin cardboard, but I cut it up and made it into a 12" by 12" box ready to put things in. The first of which was to fill the box with these little package peanuts as if you would open up the box to find the Airfix kit for the album.

To make it feel like an actual package, I bought some parcel tape to tape up the edges like you would see if it had just arrived to your front door.

The sticker of approval for this box is now my band logo, of which I have stuck on the top of the box. This is a little personal touch that I decided to add as if they had just sent them out themselves.

What is a box without its packaging stickers? Well, I decided to create some fairly realistic looking labels, all of which have a little touch of comedy to as they have inappropriate references on along with the fragile biscuits icon as something a little funny to add to the designs.

Here we go then, here is my box with all of its labels on, including the actual Airfix kit on the inside as if you have just opened it up!

Here we have a set of photos that I took on my camera today using the lighting rig to try and take some smart shots of it while trying to be clever with the shadows.

I took the best photo into Photoshop and started layering up the textures to make it feel more rustic as I feel like it looks much better and more interesting.

I made the front cover so here we are with the back cover, and for this one I have just moved the image to the side, then added in some text about the band along with all of the song titles.

So, I have printed them out so that I can go in turn it into a real life mockup to put it around an existing album cover to go with the vinyl I made earlier.

Here we go then, here is my album cover! I think it looks really cool, from the textures, all the way to the layout of the actual album cover as for some reason I find it quite nice to look at, I think it is more to do with the shadows of the box.

Here are a selection of photos I took at our group crit with everything out on display for our course to look at. I is really nice to see everything put next to each other as it feels much more like a set.

When it comes to creating mockups, I really like to use Anthony Boyd's website as they are all high quality and are easy to use, plus there are loads of different ones. There just so happened to be an album cover mockup, so I decided to place my designs into them to have a digital mockup.

I felt like it would be cool to create my own mockup, so I downloaded a photo of someone holding a record on Unsplash.com, opened it in Photoshop and worked through a mockup tutorial, from adjusting a smart image layer to position my design into the right angle all the way to adding a couple of textures over the top to work as the lighting to make it feel less digital.

Here we go then, here is my own mockup from a downloaded image holding both of my designs. This is just another nice way to see my designs in the real world.

Round two then, I downloaded another image, this time of a set of records leaning up against a wall of records. So, I followed the same steps as the last one to create my own mockup in a way that looks fairly realistic as if it was in the real world once again.

Here is my second mockup then, and yet again I feel like it is a really cool way to visualise my designs. These are really handy skills to have as I develop through my career as it will come in really helpful to show my designs in the real world on different objects.