Blog Post 21 - Stage 1 - Completed Design: Rear Cover - Background

My finished design for Stage One: DVD Amaray Case Wrap

As mentioned in Blog Post 11, the third and final element of the DVD Case Wrap that I will be explaining and evaluating is that of the rear cover. In a similar vain to that of the Front Cover, the Rear Cover also features a large range of elements which when brought together will form the finished Rear Cover. For reference, my finished design is posted here. In regards to the different elements of the rear cover, these include the following which will be discussed and explained: Background; DVD Information; Gene Hunt; Ford Capri; DVD Summary Information, Actors and Music Information. Therefore the first element that I will discuss is that of the Background.

Background.

My first port of call for the Rear cover was to organise that of the background. I must admit that when I first starting doing the rear cover I wasn't too sure of the route that I was going to take, so once again I went back to the previous Ashes to Ashes DVD Covers that I had researched on Blog Post 6. Unfortunately this was not very conclusive as there was a mix of plain areas but also areas with photographs too. With this in mind I thought long and hard about the route to take, however in the end came up with an idea that I thought would work well. This was previously lightly mentioned back in Blog Post 15 whereas I was talking about the creation of the Mirror Man title and how it linked in with Gene Hunt's mirrored world in 2014. I decided to do a further play on words to that of Mirror Man, whereas the rear cover would be a mirror image of the front cover which I thought would be a nice play on words, albeit a subtle one that might take a little bit of noticing if it wasn't pointed out. To do this, it was firstly time saving that I already had the front cover background in place, which I explained and discussed in Blog Post 13.

Flipped background added to the DVD Case Cover.

Leading on from this, I decided to create a new Layer Group called Rear Cover, as to keep all the layers in a logical order whereby I could find them again in the future if needed. I went to the Backgrounds Layer group that I had previously created and found the Background FC Layer that that I previously used on the Front Cover. When on this layer, by right clicking I was able to choose Duplicate Layer which I then confirmed to duplicate the layer into the DVDAmarayCover file. Once this was duplicated, I decided to move the duplicated layer into the Background Layer folder as to keep everything in order. As I wanted to create a flipped image of the Background I decided to navigate to Edit -> Transform -> Flip Horizontal which would allow me to flip the orientation of the layer. I used this instead of the Image -> Image Rotation -> Flip Horizontal as if I did this then the entire canvas would be flipped with I certainly did not want. Therefore by using the Edit layer, this would only affect the Layer that I had selected. Once this layer had been flipped horizontally I could then use the Move Tool which would allow the swift relocation of the back cover. It was also very useful that I previously took heed of using the guidelines, as this meant that my calculations were correct as the cover for the front perfect fitted that of the rear which was a sign that that calculations were true and correct.

With the background now in place for the Rear Cover, this mean that I could now begin to add the rest of the different elements to the Rear Cover, with the first stage now being the DVD Information.