Assignment: After seeing this done many times, I finally decided to give the project “An Album Cover” a go.  Very interesting concept that has you taking a band name, album title, and cover image all from random sources and putting them together in your own way. Assignment could’ve benefited from a more creative name though I think

Process: I went to the Wikipedia, Quotations Page, and Flickr to get Los Angeles Fashion Week, ‘wrote some blues’, and a scenic countryside pic respectively. I was surprised how well everything came together, I really liked the band name I got. Instead of using the full “Los Angeles Fashion Week” phrase, I shortened it to “L.A. Fashion Week” which sounds much better and more modern. Maybe something that an indie band might choose to be ironic or something.

The album name was a bit trickier, as the full quote I got was:

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. – Duke Ellington

We were instructed to take the last 4 or 5 words, but “Pout and wrote some blues” didn’t sound that appealing to me (even if I changed wrote to write) so I decided to just grab those last 3 words and name the release “Wrote some blues”.

Then… I had to open GIMP and put all of these into the cover. Since I already had the album image, the most difficult thing to do was choose appropriate fonts for everything.  For ‘L.A.’ I chose a font that I felt looked like an old private investigator sort of font (Niagra Engraved), but then mixed it with a nice cursive font to contrast (Pristina). The album title got stuck up top and is much smaller and in black to hopefully identify it as the title, not the band name. Chose another cursive font, but one which was slightly more personal and imperfect than the one chosen for ‘Fashion Week’. I also added the ‘Drop Shadow’ filter to all three bits of text, although I would’ve liked to see the effect come out stronger.  At home my laptop has a stronger drop shadow script installed that I would’ve benefited from.

Story: L.A. Fashion Week is an indie band from Oklahoma.  The band has three members, Travis Shoren (lead singer), Lindie Johnson (bass), and Aaron Schwartz. They’ve never been to Los Angeles, but continue to play at local venues and bars with dreams of someday making a MySpace band page.

I’d say this is a great DS106 assignment and I feel pretty lucky that my three elements fit together pretty nicely.  Was very fun to do

- Paul

After reading Kristie’s blog, I decided to do the assignment called An Album Cover by Crazylegs under the Visual Assignments.

The Assignment
The assignment read:

So here’s something fun for everyone to do, should be quick and easy, but try to make it pretty. First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article is now the name of your band. Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover. Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.

The Process
First, as the assignment said, I went to the three websites to get my band name, album title, and the album photo.
Then I used an application on my iPad called Fotolr???. It’s a Japanese application and I’m sorry I couldn’t find the website for it.
The editing was quite easy since I didn’t need to change the size. I only put the effects on it.

The Story
Um… I don’t know what to write about it but I really like how my album cover came out. I think the random names matched each other. I especially like the photo from flickr because it has a mysterious aura and I think it goes well with the album title.

Image: Fore! ~ Explore No. 174 by esther sarah emily — CC Licensed via flickr

So here is my 3rd assignment~  this is one of the visual assignments called “An Album Cover”

this is how I did it~

First you must go on Wikipedia and find a random article!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

I found “Astralium Steralle” which is a kind of sea snail i guess

whatever the title of the article is will be the name of your band/artist or whatever~

next you look for a random quote here.
http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

I found this quote “In a country as big as the United States, you can find fifty examples of anything”

scroll to the bottom of the page and the last 4-5 words of the last quote will be the title of your album

Lastly, you must look for a random image for your album~
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

in my case I found this image by SoyMariona
and I used the app Instagram on my itouch in order to give the image a bit more of a…. cool look? I dunno..

then I used Photoshop to put everything together.

Hey guys!

Here’s my second ds106 assignment!! ?

The Assignment:

This assignment is a visual assignment and I chose this assignment because I wanted to play around with images. So, here are the directions he gave me!!

So here’s something fun for everyone to do, should be quick and easy, but try to make it pretty. First, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The title of the article is now the name of your band. Next, go here: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 Go to the bottom of the page. The last four to five words of the last quote are the title of your first album Lastly, go here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Select the 3rd image. It is the picture for your album cover. Manipulate the picture, resize it, add some other color, whatever. Do the same with the band name and album title, put them over top. However you wanna do it. Make it look cool.

The Process:

So first, as I was told, I went to the three sites to get my band name, my album name and my album image. My band name turned out to be Cosmonaut, my album name is The object that provoked it and my image was: le ombre del giorno che muore! – ***explore!!***, by erman_53fotoclik.

When I got my image, I went to an image editor site called Picnik. I uploaded my picture and cropped it to a reasonable size.

Then I put an effect on the picture called “Lomo-ish”.

Then I inserted my band name after I chose a font that suits the name Cosmonaut.

Finally for the title of the album, I wanted to play it up a bit so I let the name scatter on the image; like so.

The Story:

By doing this assignment, I was able to use Picnik and lean a little about it from my friend. First I thought it was going to be a complicated process however, at the end, I had a fun time making this album cover. I was planning on naming some of the tracks in the album but I couldn’t think of any good ones so I didn’t.

Well, here’s my finished album cover!!