Back Cover and Blending Options

The layout of the back cover will be quite simple, utilizing most of the techniques that have appeared in this blog before. Authenticity is still the main goal with the design, so its important to include elements that appear on most DVD covers. In one of the DVD covers I looked at (IP man), the way they handle the certifications and logo's looked really professional. I decided to borrow that part of the layout design for my own cover. It's unlikely that that the publishing company has a patent on that kind of design, and because its so basic, I think its hard to claim its original. However it's still important to consider that I'm still stealing someone's design work.

The first thing that needed to be decided was what background should the back cover have. It was possible to alter my front cover so that the panorama and clouds extend across the both sides, however I decided to go with something basic. As the cover is quite dark already, and the front cover is framed by these black bars, I felt a gradient that transitions from black to dark blue would blend in well with the front.

Implementing a gradient is quite simple, by double clicking the colour selection in the top bar its possible to customize how the gradient works. Once the colour is set, the gradient is created by clicking and dragging the mouse.　The line shown on the screen indicates the direction of the gradient and the length of the transition. If the line is long, then between the two end points, the transition will be longer. I decided to go with a vertical gradient with black being at the bottom, as the more important parts of the back (story, stills) should draw the eye more then the legal and certification parts.

The first thing I decided to add to the back cover is the special edition features box, and the box to hold the film stills. I wanted to keep with the basic design choices, so I used the vector tools to make dotted line rectangle boxes. The colour scheme for these boxes are consistent with the back cover, with blue being the outline and black being the fill.

For the film stills I decided to take random stills from movies featuring my actors.The quality of these stills are okay but they are captured from HD YouTube footage rather then from an actual DVD or other higher quality source. The stills are scaled low enough that the lack of quality is hard to notice, but it could still affect how the film is perceived by the customer. Nothing special was used for the film stills, they were simply placed into the Photoshop document and scaled to fit into the box.

The other major part of the back cover is the area where the bar code, certification and company logos will reside. As I mentioned earlier I decided to use the layout from the Ip Man cover, which can easily be built with the vector rectangle tools. I strive to make it authentic as possible, aiming to have it consistent with not only the Ip man Cover, but other covers as well.　The certification is important to get right, as it adds a lot to the legitimacy of the cover and makes it feel more realistic. I have had some feedback on this part of my cover, as people noticed the low quality logo's that I have used for the certification. I was told to use some SVG's (scalable vector graphics), which I will attempt to add in soon.

After these 3 main parts were constructed, I added some flourishes and space for the text. In its current iteration the text seems to be too much and quite small. I decided it was be better to cut out some of the story text and make it bigger as story in the context of martial arts DVD isn't that important anyways.

In general terms I tried to pick fonts that made sense. The god of war font for the title was selected because the serif fonts are more legible then non serif fonts and that because the serifs are so pronounced, the font make the title stand out and gives it a violent look. The serifs also help underline the actors and guide the viewers eyes which I feel makes for a good title. The credit portion of the back cover is mainly a mimicked style like you would see as credits of a movie.  I decided to use a very basic font as the blurb is quite big it doesn't particularly need the use serifs to help the user follow the text.

As I'm currently dealing with text, I decided to go back and add some effects to the title of the movie. At the moment I'm simply just using a borrowed font, which looks good but it doesn't really stand out as much as it could.


I wanted the text to have bit more of a 3D look so I used the bevel and emboss options to add in some shading and highlights to the image. Combining this with some inner/outer glows and shadows it really makes the text stand out. Blending options also allowed me to add a slight gradient to the text, making it a bit more visually interesting then a flat block of colour.

Overall I feel that the cover is mostly complete. All that is needed is tightening some area's up and finish the spine which contains already made up elements, so I wont blog about it here. There's definitely some minor issues with the layout, as it feels a bit cluttered at times. The outline of the boxes holding the stills or the special features are a bit to dark to see, but they do frame that content nicely. I think, the cover is in a good enough state now that I can start working on the label.

mkfan789, Jun 17 2011. Dragon Tiger Gate - Restaurant Fight Scene, [youtube] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rFyKwjgGeE [06/05/2014].

mkfan789, Jun 17 2011. Dragon Tiger Gate - Double Devils Fight Scene, [youtube] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7k9afrqm_E&noredirect=1 [06/05/2014].

Chauster82, Jun 17 2011. Sword Fight Scene from War, [youtube] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxMgFbyBTo [06/05/2014].