Whether you are designing for the Web, a flyer, cover art, or a GUI – you should be familiar with the fundamentals of graphics design. Designing graphic art electronically is not like painting; you don’t need to be talented. All you need is to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of an “appealing” design. When designing a work of graphic art, there are three key concepts to be aware of: color, balance, and simplicity. Color, or color theory: your colors must match. No matter the project, your colors must be complement each other. Matching colors is very important - you can ignore the other two concepts and still create appealing artwork.

Balance, or the graphic’s center of gravity: always make sure that your objects are balanced. A flyer where all the text and images are to one side is unbalanced. You should distribute objects and elements evenly by imagining that the center of the image is your center of gravity and the areas to the right and left operate like a balance; to have appealing artwork you must reach equilibrium.

Simplicity, or K.I.S.S(1): This is a well-known concept in many fields. In this case, it weorks this way: heavily decorated artwork is irritating, and overcolored logos are not necessarily eye candy. Stuffing too many objects or images into a piece of work exhausts the viewer’s eyes.

Now, with those three concepts in mind, let’s start designing! From now on, I will be giving detailed illustrations on every project we undertake. I will also teach independently of any particular software package (2). We will start our Design Credo series with CD artwork for DJ Rose’s release Mixed Dreams. (2)

After launching my favorite Image Editing Software (3), and starting a new CD template image – let’s get designing! The first thing we need to do is the background, because the background will determine the colors and fonts you can use. There are many ways to get a good background. Your Image Editing software should come with backgrounds, or you can always use Abstract Stock Images libraries from the Internet (4). I have decided to use a blue abstract image for the CD:

Illustration 1: The blue abstract imageAfter choosing the abstract image, we need to add it to the CD template:

Illustration 2: The blue abstract image
after being put as a CD template backgroundNow we add the titles. In our case, it’s the singer’s name and the album title, which are: “ROSE” and “MIXED DREAMS”. There are millions of ways to design and position those three words. How we do that is dependent on fonts, which are obviously essential for logo design. Here are various off-CD distributions of the two titles.

Illustration 3: Various off-CD distributions of the two titlesNotice the simplicity of the text distribution and its balance. I have used only three different fonts: Arial, Century Gothic and Tw Cen. Any of these logos, if taken and put on the CD, will create a nice layout, but let’s limit ourselves to working with the first one for purposes of this example. Since the background is dark-blue, we certainly need a light color to fulfill the color complement. I will use the Silver 3D effect that every Image Editor has by default. The logo will look like this on the blue background:

Illustration 4: The logo in Silver 3D effectIt certainly jumps out at you, doesn’t it? That silver effect is very simple, and with a little bit of shadow effect and making it 3D, you can make any logo look like our example. Since we are designing for a person here, we might want to customize the logo a little bit instead of working direct from template, so let’s play around with “ROSE” until we get the following:

Illustration 5: Customizing “ROSE”What we did here was quite simple: just remove the inner circle of the O. If your program doesn’t allow you to do this, remove the O entirely and replace it with a closed circle. Add the rose from your image library.

Illustration 6: Removing the inner circle of the ONow, we need to add the tracklist, and insert the logo and tracklist into the CD template. You can literally put them *anywhere* on the CD. Here are three examples:

Illustration 7: Three examples of the CDThese three are all perfectly good, but I personally like the third CD the most; it’s a matter of taste anyway. So, let’s now work on this. When you look at this, do you get the same sense of a borderless logo that I do? We can fix this by simply making the background of the logo and tracklist a little bit darker.

Illustration 8: The logo and tracklist with a darker backgroundSo how did we do that? We simply created three rectangles: the first thin rectangle, the main rectangle, and the third thin rectangle. We made them behind the logo and tracks and above the background using the Layers tool, and made their transparency 70%. After that, we should spice up the CD a little. How about adding some stars with different sizes and transparencies?

Illustration 9: Adding starsThen we add the production company’s logo at the bottom; which in our case is mine: Sorcerism’s MusicWare and GWYN DESIGN studios.

Illustration 10: Adding the company informationNow we can finally add the picture of Rose herself on the CD:

Illustration 11: The final look Et voila! We have made good use of colors, the CD is pretty much balanced and it’s very simple - the perfect triplet of GFX design.

1. K.I.S.S is an abbreviation for Keep It Simple, Stupid. For more information, consult wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K.I.S.S
2. DJ Rose is real – She is known in CyberArmy as LtKer Rose, an executive officer in the Privacy Commission, commanding the Privacy Publications group and leading the Privacy Watch Releases project.
3. FYI, I use PhotoImpact 11 from Ulead Systems, Inc.
4. An example of that is Stock Exchange (stx.ru)