NEW MEDIA
COURSEWORK –
CMT3331
NKANU, ATIMBANG AGBAM
M004306651
Middlesex University
Mauritius Branch Campus
AN710@live.mdx.ac.uk
M00430651
1/17/2013
LIFE IN HELL
Beyond the grave…
INTRODUCTION
The task I have is to create a book cover. The design is to consist of two main parts, which
are the front cover and the spine of the book in an A4 paper size.
For this project I choose the title “Life in Hell”, as it will give me the opportunity to possibly
introduce to my audience how life could be beyond death.
Walking pass a grave I got a reflection of the possibility of the dead living beyond the grave.
So I asked myself, “Could the by life beyond this grave?”. A lot often time, human fantasizes
on how life could be in Heaven and Paradise with little or no idea about the dead, and how
life could be in Hell.
This question has been on my mind for some time so I got the idea of designing a book cover.
This report will set out to describe in details the procedures, challenges and steps undertaken
in the course of this design.
PHOTOGRAPHY
To take the photos, I gained permission from the security office in a grave yard. The camera I
used was my colleagues’s Fuji FinePix SL300 II lens camera. I choose this camera because of
its high resolution and size for post processing and editing of the photo. I used Adobe
Photoshop CS6 on a MacBook® Pro with retina display of 15.4”. I choose Photoshop editing
software because it provides a more image editing power, new creative options, and the
Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine for blazingly fast performance.
COLOUR HARMONY
In designing the book cover, colour harmony was accomplished by using red for blood;
Orange, yellow for fire and black in darkness as it signifies Hell. All these colours were
carefully chosen and blended together to achieve harmony in the design.
To get started with the design, I created a layer and imported the picture to the layer with a
combination of black and red gradient background colour. I was careful on on the design so I
made sure different layers were created for each effect to allow ease of manipulation and
modification. I used a free transform tool to resize the picture and blurred the picture to get a
perfect match with the background, and the picture was centralized in the middle of the layer.
In an attempt to make the picture look old and scary, I duplicated the image layer into two,
turned the first layer to gray and changed the mode to overlay. Then I added a gradient
overlay to the second layer to get a blood stain and a perfect match with the background.
LAYOUT AND TYPOGRAPHY
An Impact font style for bold layout of the text with a black background was a perfect choice
as it shows clearly the idea of the design. The name of the theme was broken into two parts
which are “Life in” and “Hell”. These two however had different meaning and was given
different design.
For the first part I used a simple nice Impact font style with a white foreground colour, While
the second part I used a Trojan font with a regular font style and 85 point font size. I also
added a fire effect on the text to get a fiery flame text; this was achieved by adding a wind
filtration to the text layer.
Additionally, I repeated the same step four times as each step increases the wind. I also added
a Gaussian blur filter with 7.5 radius pixels, I duplicated the flame layer and made it red by
reducing the saturation, I also set the duplicated layer to colour dodge mode and merged it
down with the original layer.
Finally I distorted the text layer into flames with the warp tools in the liquify dialog and
evaluated the distortion as necessary. When I was satisfied with it, I held down the shift key
to save the load and distortion mesh. I used this fire effect to create “HELL” as it is believed
that hell is associated with fire.
All the text was placed below as I was careful not to block the picture with the text.
In order to achieve perspective on the design, I snapped the picture from an angel that allows
the control of depth illusion. However I blurred the perspective and faded it into the
background.
LIMITATION
Although this coursework was quite interesting as it gave me the opportunity to bring fiction
into reality, It does not mean it was without its challenges. The difficulty I had was my
inability to get permission to take pictures inside an open grave as this would have helped me
portray my idea to my target audience.
CONCLUSION
This design could have been done better if necessary environment and time was given, I
could have used a more advance tools if I had time to learn it. However, I’m proud and
happy with the level of work I’ve produced.