Studio Brief 1: Neon lights design

For my fourth design, I want to incorporate neon lights into it because of my previously stated initial idea that comes from fairground rides. This links to the lyric "Take me on a roller coaster", which portrays excitement and seems to be a metaphor for taking the band on an exciting journey into the music industry.

For this, I thought of taking photographs of some lights that are dotted around my college. I'm pretty pleased with how these photographs turned out as I wasn't definitely going to use them as a design on their own, but now I'm happy with the dark pink photographs as opposed to the lighter ones. I think they portray Roxy Music quite well, and emit excitement that is prominent in 'Virginia Plain'.

I chose my favourite photo and cut it down to the record size, and played around with the levels and saturation, etc to get the best balance of colours.

I cut out the pink light and played around with simplifying the design, but I prefer the original photo.

I also learnt from internet tutorials how to make a neon light effect on photoshop with the paintbrush tool, which looks quite effective, but I gave up on this idea and thought it best to stick with the photograph.

My design for the interim crit:

I will not be developing this design further, but I will still submit it to the competition. From the interim crit I saw that no one mentioned this design, which made me think it probably came across as a filler or quite boring. This put me off developing it, but I really like it myself as a photograph. Maybe it doesn't work as a record sleeve as it isn't very clear in it's communication.