RB: Advert Design 1

First Draft

• As a group, we decided that we wanted to have a chess board theme for our album cover and adverts.
• After looking at some of Bloc Party's past album and single adverts, I noticed that they usually use similar pictures to the album cover and have a fairly simple design.
• For example, this is their album cover for 'Weekend In The City' (2007)

and these are the adverts for the singles released from the album.

• Based on this research, I decided to keep the chess board theme we are planning to use for our album cover, but not have the actual album cover on the poster.
• This is my initial design for the poster:

• I have kept the chess board as the background for the whole page of the poster and added text and additional images.
• I made this advert by drawing out the design and text and scanning it into the computer. I then used Paint to fill in the black squares.
• When I make the advert on Photoshop, I will make the text in a different colour to the background so it stands out against the black. As I was unable to do this when sketching the design I have kept the background behind the text white.
• I have included the most important information (band name and album title) in the largest font at the top of the page. The information about the release and singles are in a smaller sized font and as the band website would only be seen by people having a proper look at the page, it is in the smallest sized font. I plan to have the font in light grey so it can be read easily against both the black and white parts of the background.
• To create an amplified representation of the album title (Four), we discussed the idea of having four chess pieces on the board in the album cover. On the poster, I will include some chess pieces scattered around the board to reinforce this theme.
• As well as the above idea, I am also considering the idea of having the chess board background begin to fade out around half way down the page so that most of the bottom third of the advert is plain black. In this case I would not include the hand in the bottom left hand corner. This idea would be fairly similar to the adverts used for the singles released from 'A Weekend In The City.'
• I will make this advert by taking a photograph of the chess board and editing it and inserting text using Photoshop.
• After thinking about the band and their target audience, I decided that my advert would appear in a music magazine such as NME.

• This is a relevant magazine to the band as they have appeared in the magazine and on the cover of the magazine in the past, as well as having the album 'Four' reviewed in an issue and given 7/10 earlier this year.

• NME is also relevant to the audience as the bands which feature in the magazine are usually of a similar genre to Bloc Party, meaning that those reading the advert are likely to be interested in the album.