Having become more confidant with both Illustrator and Photoshop, frame animation and the processes involved in creating a QR code link; it’s become much easier and quicker to put together this piece. Through a lot of trial and error, I learned that a lot of what I was doing was over complicated and could be simplified to be a much quicker process.
Having worked all this out, I finally came to finish the first version of the cover, complete with the Gif:
I took this piece around my fellow students in studio initially, and this gave me some good feed back, the main focus being that I slowed down the the fish and changed their movement a little, making it much smoother.
I then took to into a crit with my tutor Anna, who pointed out a major flaw in my design; gold ink is not cheap to print with and also tends to loose it’s colour slightly in print. In addition, the gold had a tendency to swallow the fish slightly. While I appreciated the input, I felt that the gold was a really cool aspect of the design and didn’t want to give up on it completely. So instead I decided that I would create another version of the cover, one that would be intended to be for a paper back version; one that would cost less to print.
After some reconsideration of my colour pallet, I decided to go with a more natural but hyperbolic colour scheme:
Changing from gold to green certainly makes the fish stand out much better and I do love how the high contrast of colours in the piece. From this point, I felt that the next step was to add in text and consider the full extent of the design, moving on to create a full cover complete with spine and back cover. This would be the next logical step in my project.
