Graphic Design

Graphic Design Skills

Graphic design skills are often needed within the music industry, whether it be designing flyers and posters to promote gigs, to design websites, logos or to design CD sleeves.

There are many computer programs that can be used for graphic design purposes, this include:

Paint - to draw basic shapes. Images are of very low quality in this program. Basic text can be added. It can only be found on Microsoft Computers

Adobe Fireworks - Used for the editing of Bitmap and vector images
Adobe Illustrator - A Vector graphics editor. It can be used to create Graphics from scratch or to edit scanned in sketches and drawings
Adobe Photoshop - Maninpulation of photos and images

JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group - Compressed, good for photos
BMP - Bit Map Picture - Uncompressed
AI - Adobe Illustrator - Illustrator's own
PSD - Photoshop Document, these can only be opened in Photoshop
GIF - Graphic Interchange Format - A Bitmap image format, good for a small number of colours like those found in logos
TIFF - Tagged File Format - Top Quality
PNG - Portable Networks Graphics - Widely supported on the Internet for widespread use. Another Bitmap format, intended to replace GIF.

I have used both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to create images.

I had a designer draw a basic sketch for a CD sleeve design, which I then edited in Adobe photoshop. I made all lines darker, adjusting the brightness and contrast of the image to do so. I then looked in the filters, effects menu, and chose a dotty effect to make the image look comic-book like. The image was used for the band Zap Zap Zap for their self titled demo which was given away at gigs.

I also created an image in Adobe Illustrator, made entirely of vectors. Following an online tutorial I created basic vector shapes and added various effects and skewed shapes. The end result was a cartoon octopus. Using Illustartor took me a fairly long time as I was not used to the program. It was fiddly to manipulate the shape of the vectors into looking how I wanted them to appear - it probably would of helped if I had used a mouse in order to make the shapes!