CMT3331 NEW MEDIA
COURSEWORK 1
M00290896
NEMITARI AJIENKA
WORK UNDERTAKEN
I decided to design a book cover on the topic ‘PLANT SYSTEMATICS’ (after looking at
other book covers) using a sunflower, text fonts relating to the topic and a bright blue sky as
the background image. I decided to use a blue sky as the background because 'plant
systematics' talks about the life of plants, photosynthesis (how plants produce their own food)
and how they interact with nature, and I wanted to portray life, that was why I went for a
plant with a bright color (the sun flower). Therefore, I went outside my house and took a
photograph of the sky when the weather was bright, then I went to a friend's house to take a
photograph of a sunflower. The last thing I did to ensure that I could do my work was to
download and install the latest version of Adobe Photoshop on my laptop because mine was
not up-to-date or advanced.
JUSTIFICATION AND EVALUATION OF SOFTWARE AND EQUIPMENT USED
HARDWARE; the camera which I used to capture my images is the Nikon Coolpix L310
Digital Camera. I made good use of the 21x optical zoom lens to make my pictures clear,
bigger, to capture them from better angles, and while taking my pictures I always turned the
sensor shift vibration reduction on to help me reduce the effect of camera shake because my
hands kept shaking all the time. I also captured the sunflower from a lower angle to make it
look bigger on my book cover because the book topic is focusing on plants and how they
interact with nature. One thing I noticed about my photographs was that the image noise was
high and I tried to correct that in Adobe Photoshop.
SOFTWARE; The software that I used for this design is the Adobe Photoshop CS6. I wanted
to design a book cover and spine on the topic 'plant systematics' which basically talks about
the way by which plants interact with nature, produce their own food and the lifecycle of
plants and I wanted to ensure that my book cover and spine to portrayed this topic very well
by having a bright blue sky as the background image on the front side of the cover to portray
nature and life, a big sunflower on top the bottom part of the sky to give the viewer an idea of
a plant full of life in nature and text fonts relating to the topic and the only software I could
use to achieve these effects is the Adobe Photoshop CS6.
I created a new document or template (in form of a layer) as the starting point for the design
and I wanted to divide it into two parts to differentiate the front side of the cover from the
spine. In order to achieve this division, I used the ruler tool to create paddings including safe
zones and bleeds. After this, I used the move tool to drag the background image (bright blue
sky) to the front side of the cover, making it a new layer, I cropped the part that I did not need
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CMT3331 NEW MEDIA
COURSEWORK 1
M00290896
NEMITARI AJIENKA
and I resized it using the transformation controls to make it fit into the front side of the cover
properly.
I used the image adjustment tools to increase the brightness of the image a bit to make it look
bright and ‘vital’ and I did this because if the sky looked dull, it would not portray my book
topic very well and plants do not really produce their food in bad weather, I would not
achieve the effects I wanted to achieve and I also increased the contrast to achieve those
effects. The second image, had a sunflower and other grasses behind it, but I did not want the
grasses behind the sunflower, therefore I used the quick selection tool to select the sunflower
from the grasses because my book cover talks about plants and not grasses, most grasses have
bad effects on plants and I wanted the plant to look so much alive and stand out on its own.
After selecting the sunflower, I used the move tool to drag and place it on top the background
image (the bright blue sky) on the front side of the book cover to make the plant look in
control and to portray an image of royalty as plants make their food themselves by interacting
with nature and using the transformation controls, I resized the image. I wanted this flower to
look 'vital' or animate and not dead, so I made it brighter, reduced the contrast a bit and made
it sharper as well to make it stand out from the cloud behind it. Then I used the rectangular
marquee tool to select the spine, and I filled it with a dark blue color using the paint bucket
tool. I went for a dark blue color to make the spine rhyme with the color of the blue sky on
the front side of the cover, to differentiate it a bit from the front side of the cover and so that
the logo and text (authors name and book title) will be clearly visible.
The next thing I wanted to do was to add the texts (the book title, authors name and edition)
to the cover. The fonts I went for are Times (bold) and the Sunflowers (bold) with white
colors. Since the book title was about plants, I decided to use a text font that will go well with
the title and also make the book cover look attractive to readers and I could not find any on
Photoshop (this was one of the issues I encountered), so I downloaded and installed the
‘sunflowers’ text font online (from; http://www.fontspace.com/category/plant). I wrote the
author’s name, and the book edition with the Times font, and with the right sizes for them to
fit into space and then I wrote the book title using the Sunflowers font which I downloaded
online, but after writing the book title, it was not clearly visible and that was not what I
wanted as I wanted the book title to look attractive.
Therefore, in order to make the book title clearly visible I adjusted the white balance of the
background image on the front side of the cover by creating an adjustment layer and adjusted
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CMT3331 NEW MEDIA
COURSEWORK 1
M00290896
NEMITARI AJIENKA
the threshold level in the threshold dialogue box using the adjustment slider, reduced the
brightness of this layer to make it darker for the text to be visible and increased the contrast to
make it in contrast with the text (the book title), finally I used the eraser tool to erase the part
below the book title, because I was not focusing on that part, I just wanted the book title to be
clearly visible and I had achieved that. The last thing I did was to add the publishers’ logo to
the front side of the cover and the spine using the move tool.
In conclusion, I tried my best to achieved all the effects I was trying to achieve, I was
satisfied with the way my work came out in the end but it was not as perfect as I expected it
to be. I learnt quite a lot about so many tools in Adobe Photoshop from the whole experience,
got to use the tools that I have never used before and I would have loved to learn more about
some other tools which I could have used to make my work better but I could not find a lot of
simple tutorials on these tools.
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