CD Cover Design

Fantabulastic's Victoria by ~SyntheticPlatypus on deviantART

The next Card in The Creative Grab Bag Series! Design a CD cover for a fake band. Luckily, I already have one of those.

Fanatbulastic starring the lovely Kabukikatze on Guitar and SyntheticPlatypus on Vocals.

Awhile back Miss Kabuki and I did an art trade where we had created a band and did posters advertising for them : Fantabulastic Poster
Miss Kabuki removed hers cleaning house :) But I assure you it it was an epic poster advertising the Russian leg of our tour.

So a little about the design of this cover. I had the band already so the hard part of figuring out a name was already taken care of. I knew I wanted to revisit fantabulastic, but how?

When I was in Victoria, Canada I fell in absolute love with the Native Art there. Evan bought a painting and I bought some magnets for the fridge. If I could have bought more I would have.

So I decided to use that as my inspiration! The CD is called Victoria for Canada and I used the design elements in their native art that makes it so unique and fantastic. The colors are simplistic and everything is made of shapes and alot of those shapes have animals in them.

I'm on the left I have glasses! Miss Kabuki is on the right. See the red hair? :)

In this picture somewhere: A beaver, a rhino, a frog, an eagle, a cardinal, and a parrot.

I had a ton of fun doing this, once I figured out how to draw with the shapes it actually came out rather quickly. Colored it in photoshop and sized it correctly.

Phoenix art by a Phoenix Artist!

Grapheme Magazine

Grapheme Magazine by ~SyntheticPlatypus on deviantART

Design a Magazine.

Though this one did not take as long as the others, the majority of this one was spent cussing and fitting about because I knew what I wanted to do, but goodness was my computer and programs against me.

I would say that about 80% of the time was spent on things that did not work. Grah. But now I know how to make pictures from text, so I learned! Which I guess is the point of all this.

So, Welcome to the first issue of Grapheme Magazine a magazine dedicated to all things typologically related.

I wanted this cover to be a bit tongue in cheek about typography. So for those of you who do not know the vocab:

Grapheme:is a fundamental unit in a written language.
Ligature: where two or more graphemes are joined as a single glyph
Kerning: refers to adjusting the space between two letters
Bleed:a printing term that refers to printing that goes beyond the edge of the sheet after trimming.
Serif:semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols.
Sans-Serif: the opposite of above!
Helvetica: A font. The best font ever, really.

I wanted this to read like a Vogue or Seventeen magazine, where there is bits of innuendo and relationship advice. It was fun coming up with the headlines.

Besides the bits I had trouble with (namely the person) this was fun to stretch a bit back into the graphic design territory and using the computer again. I'm glad I could, the undo button came in handy for this one.

Also normally, I wouldn't have left such a big space to the left of the word Helvetica, but I left that there for shipping stickers if someone was to get a subscription for this magazine.