Evaluation of ancillary tasks

I have used stylistic quality of the hard rock genre, in particular the blues aspect of it to influence my design for the digipak and the magazine advert. I modeled the front cover on the design for Stevie Ray Vaughn's album 'SRV', which depicts his trademark guitar in black and white. In this genre, signature guitars are just as important to the band's identity as the members themselves. Hand of Aces have their own trademark guitars by which they are well known for - Danny Dixon has his Zakk Wylde Gibson Les Paul, James Pattison had his tobacco-burst Fender Stratocaster and Lloyd Tudor has his blue Fender P' Bass. As James was the frontman of this band I decided to use an image of a Fender Strat for the front cover. I came to the conclusion that this would be perfect to represent the band, especially if I incorporated their 'fistful of aces' band logo. I also decided upon this choice as the Fender Strat is the most commonly used guitar and a key image in electric blues. Even the signature guitar of SRV was a custom designed Fender Strat. I found a perfect, artistic, black and white photo of the guitar on Google, and this became the feature cover of the digipak. The back cover, I modeled on the back cover of '...And Justice For All' by Metallica, in terms of layout and organisation of information. The inside cover, was designed to be simplistic yet still representative of the band, so I came to the decision of a black background with the four suits of a pack of playing cards, diamonds, clubs, hearts and spades, laid out. The inlay was designed to be the band logo represented in realistic terms, so I found an image of a human hand holding the four aces, and I used the magic wand tool to cut out the band name in the flesh of the hand. For the magazine advert, I took inspiration from magazines such as NME, Kerrang and Classic Rock. The design was supposed to appeal to the younger teenage audiences and to be the style that would appear in Kerrang and Classic Rock. I wanted it to stand out from the album cover, but still incorporate it into the design. I decided to use the Fender Strat image on the front cover but I inverted the colours so that the black would become white and the white would become black. I blew the image up to a size large enough to cover most of an A4 page, decided to use a military stenciled style font to appeal to the teenage culture of rockers, and included the band logo in the top left of the page large enough to be recognised. I decided to include incentive information about the album as a marketing tool, including information of what sort of music is on the CD, and the fact there is an official music video included, and I stated the date the album would be due to be released. Overall, I am very much pleased with my eventual outcome and as a matter of fact, so are the band themselves!