DVD Label

I wanted my DVD label to be simple in design yet still show the genre and title of the film clearly. I took an Idea from my design sketches that I drew earlier and choose to use the blood hand print that I drew. This clearly shows which genre my film is and shows the title of the film.

To start off with I setup the guidelines for my dvd label. I used the dimensions on the VLE and setup the guidelines, I also included a 3mm bleed area. This bleed area allows any printing errors that may occur when I print out my design.

I then used the elliptical tool to create the DVD outlines and also the 3mm bleed area. 

I decided to use the same image that I have already used in my DVD cover design to continue the flow of the whole DVD. Using the same background image on my DVD label as well as my cover gives the whole design symmetry. Once I uploaded the image I then used the free transform tool to resize the image. 

To remove the extra bits of image outside of the label area, I used the elliptical marque tool to select the middle circle and then removed it. To remove the outside of the label area, I used the same elliptical marque tool. Only this time I had to invert the selection so that everything outside of the label area was selected, I then removed the selection.

To make a blood hand I decided to take a picture of my own hand using a digital camera. I felt that using a real hand would make the blood print look more realistic and more horrifying.

Once I had taken a picture of my hand, I then imported it into photoshop where I used the selection tools to get rid of the background behind the hand so that only my hand was left on a white background. I then used the Hue & Saturation window to adjust the values of the image until they looked a nice deep red colour. 

To make the hand look more like blood and more realistic I used the vibrance window to adjust the saturation. This will make hand look more darker and look more like blood.

Once I had adjusted the values, I went about placing the image onto my DVD label.

I then added the title onto my label. I wanted to use the same font as I used on my dvd cover to keep the symmetry and flow of the DVD going. Instead of using red colour font this time, I used black so that it would not clash with the red of the hand image. 

I wanted the text to wrap around the label and curve around the edge. This will look a lot better than horizontal text and will flow better with the shape of the label. To do this I used the warp text tool. I opened up the warp text tool and then adjusted the bend, horizontal and vertical distortion of the text until I was happy with the curve of the text.

At this point I wasn't happy with the way the design was going. I felt as though the hand was ruining the design as it didn't look like a blood hand print. So I decided to keep the rest of the design but find an alternative hand print. I managed to find a photoshop brush pack on the internet (http://zeds-stock.deviantart.com/art/Bloody-Hand-Prints-Brush-Pack-134526043) The brushes in the pack will allow me to use the paint brush tool in photoshop and then just select which hand print brush I want to use. 

 I deleted the original hand print layer and then deselected the text title layer so that it would not interfere with me placing the new hand print onto the label. I then selected a colour which looked the most like red blood and then placed the hand print onto the label using the paint brush tool.

Finally I used the elliptical marque tool to select the inner circle area and remove the part of the hand print. I then reactivated the text layer so that the text was visible and the label was complete. Overall I am very happy with the final design of the DVD label. It goes well with my original idea which was to create a simple label which shows the horror genre and title of the film. It also fits in very well with my DVD cover as it uses the same background image and font, so both elements tie in nicely and have design symmetry.