U2 - ONE

Study and creation of the CD Sleeve

Chiara Bullo - Graphic Design BTEC diploma Lev 3

There is a specific reason why I chose this song. This song reminds me my last year in school, me and my friends we used to listen “one”  a million times a day during our study session!

I wanted to create something that would represent  the idea of two people like “One” but at same time different from each other.

The first step to my ideas come from a picture that I saw hang up on a wall at WAES.

This picture shows probably the same person at different ages.(other example are shown here).

What I wanted instead was matching a female face with a man face and a good idea actually come from the following picture.(source http://themetapicture.com/gender bending/ )

My first attempt was tried to matching down a frontal woman’s face with a profile man’s face using Photoshop.

Simply cutting out the man’s face and and overlapping it on the woman’s face I’ve tried to have a “one” face.

But to be honest this result didn’t satisfy me because I didn’t achieve my idea of “Two people in one”

Then I tried to erase out the man’s face, leaving only the shape of his profile but the result in my opinion was even worse even if it creates a nice and interesting optical effect.

(thanks for the pictures http://www.flickr.com/photos/compositecharacter/5761745195/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/otsebmi/2956172416/).

Browsing on Flickr I found a couple of image that seemed  suitable to me!

Both of them are in black and white, which was perfect for my purpose because I didn’t have to worry about matching the skin and hair color!!Moreover, I really liked the idea of having two people from different ethnic backgrounds.

(thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/krishaamer/2806839156/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/joinn/2350672408/)

Using Photoshop I applied the same techniques used for the photo retouching.Overlapping the two picture and using the mask and gradient I got this result, which satisfied me in full. Just a couple of other retouches to minimize the imperfection and  here we are.

This picture fits perfectly my idea of the song and I was very happy with it! The next step was to add titles in the cover. I felt more comfortable using Illustrator to type this and this is why I Imported the original file in it.

I tried a couple of different font but my ideas was to not to have something disturbing but rather something that integrates itself. In order to do not take away attention from the photo. I used “Dirt2 Death” font for the front and for the back as well.

For the back, I decided for black background and white text, using a “Carbon Type” font and keeping the band’s name and the title in “Dirt2 Death” as before.I added a 0.5 stroke as frame and decided to turned it into an artistic brush and also reduced the opacity at 50%.In the next page you can see the final results.

I searched only content with a Creative Commons license.All the images can be modified, adapted, or built upon according to

Creative Commons License.