How to Make CD Cases

Video Transcript

"I'm Alexis Neubert of Alexis Design and this is how you make a CD case or a CD cover. A standard jewel case has a front tray card that is 4.75 inches square so that's where we're going to begin. Create a document like Adobe In Design that can incorporate both text and images, have a 4 and 3/4-inch square document and then you can start adding whatever text or graphics you want. For this example I am going to locate a graphic here on my system. You can just drag and drop any images into In Design, adjust the sides of the picture box to crop. If you need to scale you can use the scale tool on the left or the percentages up towards the top here so maybe we'll make this a little bit bigger, with CD artwork very often the image is quite large. If you want to change the shape of your picture box you can use the object palette and choose convert shape and there's a number of options. We'll try making a circle, add in our CD title, choose a font, use your type tool after you have created your text tool by dragging, just type in your text in the text box and select your text, change the font again if you want, adjust the size, try and make this nice and big at the top. If you want to adjust the alignment of your text to have it centered, right or left aligned, you want to use these alignment buttons at the top tool palette. We're going to center this. Let's say we want to add a background color. You can grab your picture box over here, start at the top corner, drag across your whole document and you may want to send it to the back. That's also found in the object menu under arrange. You send that object to the back and then on the right-hand side you use your color palette to choose a background color. Maybe we'll just choose a simple black for this. That means we'll have to change our text color. Let me add another color box to this and just keep going dragging additional images or creating additional text boxes with your type tool like so. You might want to add a border to your image or your picture box, you can choose a stroke from the top palette up here, choose the thickness of it or you can use your stroke palette on the right hand side to do that as well and then your swatches you can toggle back and forth between background color and stroke color to make changes there and after a few quick adjustments you can end up with a very nice CD case."