Week 6 Review - Illustrator Improvements

Now that I have discussed and gathered all of my feedback I have started to implement these changes. Many of the suggested improvements for this element of my design included factors which I would have created anyway it just so happened that my disk design wasn't finished when this was shown. The first improvement which was suggested by all those who reviewed my work was to add a text wrap. I decided to add some of the main information about the film to my disk and then wrap this text around the main image. To do this I simply used the type tool to create the text and then on a new layer used the pencil to draw around the actors in the main image. This helped to scale down the text wrap so that my text only wrapped around the pencil line rather than the box which encapsulated the image. I then selected the two of these together and used the Object, Text Wrap Tool. More details into this can be found in my Text Wrap Tutorial which I undertook in an earlier blog post. You can see this in place from the screenshot below. I left the large box on show so you can see why I used the pencil tool to draw an outline.

The second feature which was suggested as an improvement was to create a logo. This was part of the mandatory requirement and hence I was of course going to create this with or without the feedback. I decided to create two different logos. The first logo was a media company logo and the second was a film logo. Both of these have been blogged about previously and these can be seen added to my disk below. As you can see from the image below my disk has now met all of the mandatory features and anything which I add now is extras so this is a much safer place to be at this stage. This logo stage also covered another suggestion from Khyle. She suggested that I look into some tutorials in order to go above and beyond so I can achieve a higher grade. You can see from my previous posts that I used three different tutorials and hence have managed to fulfil two pieces of criteria in one go.

 

Tony suggested that I should look at the size of the age ratings like I did for the DVD inlay. All the details which I found on this can be seen on the Week 6 Review - Photoshop Improvements blog post. These were simply left as they are. 

 



Jamie suggested that like with my Photoshop work I needed to add some legal information onto my disk. I used the same information which I had already added to my Photoshop work to this Illustrator disk cover. I selected the Type Tool and then simply copied and pasted this over. I used the same font as I have throughout this design - Harlow Solid Italic and then set the size to 4pt. I then used the Arch Tool to make this text follow the bleed line. The final stage in this process was to use the Direct Selection Tool. I used this tool to make the two ends of the sentence larger than the middle. This was purely for aesthical purposes. The image below shows my disk with this element added.

 

The final piece of feedback which Jamie gave was in regards to a previous disk design. For reference this can be seen below. Jamie said how he liked the solid bar through the middle of this disk and wondered if this could be incorporated into the final design in some way. Mixing the two was not something I had previously considered however I was willing to give it a try. I used the same technique I used to create the bar in the design stage on my now nearly finished disk.

 

 

The image below shows the solid bar added to my design. I don't personally like this design as much as I like my original and for this reason I decided that I would try to reduce the opacity.

 

The image below shows this bar with the opacity toned down to 57%.

 

I feel this looks a lot better and I will be keeping this in place. The image below shows my now final disk design with all improvements incorporated.