Final Digipak design

Here is my final design for my digipak! The top half is the outside cover and the bottom half is the inside. The bottom right is where the CD would go, and the image printed on it would fit in to the background. I boosted the colour on the photos because I wanted the Digipak to be more vibrant and stand out, and as the theme for our artist is quite bold and stylish anyway I thought this would fit. I also used a brick background, as we use one in the video to put our scrabble pieces on, so it also fits with the music video.

Overall I'm really pleased with how this turned out, and I think it works well with the genre.

More Digipak designs

Yesterday I took a few more picture of the same background I used for the main photo, and I got home and had another play around with the look of the digipak.




















It's still not finished, as this is definitely not the font I'm using and I still need to do the inside of the case. However, I think this works a lot better as a cover compared to my first design. I'm also not sure about the edge of my case, as I think that using more brick wall looks a little bit busy. What I might do instead is maybe photograph a bit of the dress Alice is wearing in the photo and use that instead.

I also need to work out how to put writing down the edge in a vertical way, and I will probably not use this colour font. The background is hard to work with when it comes to font, as there are lots of different colours and tones going on.

I'm also not sure what to call the album. I know it's doesn't really matter, as it's more about the design, but I want to use something that goes with the theme of the digipak and the video. I might use one of the song titles as an album name, as I know this conforms to my brand, and I think 'London Boots' might be a good title, as we have lots of shots of London in the video, and the picture looks like it was taken in the city.

First Digipak design

I've put a couple of the digipak pictures on photoshop next to each other, and here we have my first digipak design. Although I like both images individually, I feel that they don't work together well and don't look like part of the same CD cover, as the colours and themes are too different.

Because of this, I decided that maybe if I changed the colours, I would have a more cohesive-looking digipak, which would still work with the theme. I gave it a go:

As you can see, this worked a lot better than the original, as the colours are similar. However, I still don't think it looks like a proper CD case, and I do really like the bright colours of the original. Because of this, I am considering reshooting the song contents and having it on the same background as the photo. The only problem with this is that the wall is part of the school building, so I don't really want to get caught writing on it. What might work better is if I take a picture of the blank wall and type over it. This would also be easier as it means that the font on the front of the case will be the same as the menu typeface.

I'm still thinking about what the inside will look like, but I want it to have a similar brick wall theme, because I think it looks really professional and is featured in our music video.

Digipak Song List

 Today I took the photos for the song list on my Digipak. I wanted to have a chalkboard theme to it, so I wrote the song names out on a chalkboard. I thought that pink was a good colour choice for the writing, because it fits in well with our star's colourful image.

Here are some photos of the setup:

And here is the final photo, which I will crop and straighten accordingly:

Digipak pictures

As part of our Digipak project we need some photos of Alice as our 'star', so we took a few today just around the school. As I take photography A-Level we thought it was probably best for me to take the photos.

I might not necessarily use any of these photos, but it was good to see some ideas come out, and Alice and Valentina might want to use some of them. We had quite a good idea of having the last ones with Alice shouting, and maybe adding the album name as a speech bubble. Also, the ones against the brick wall would be good, as part of our scrabble-spelling-out-lyrics shots features a brick background on a piece of paper. Also it fits in quite well with our London based theme. The blue dress against the orange background is also quite eye catching and would make a good album cover.

Logo

Today in our lesson we had a look at some ideas for our logo. We wanted to use a handwriting-style font, as many female artists such as Pixie Lott have their signature (or something that could be their signature) as their logo. We found a website that does free handwriting style fonts and here were some that we liked:

This one was fairly simple but looks unusual and striking. However we decided that it wasn't bold enough, but we could use bold on it in word.

These two are quite similar, but we decided that we liked 'never let go' better, as it looks more like natural handwriting. This is a possible font we could use.

We liked this one but it looks a bit too much like a font rather than handwriting, so we weren't sure about it. 

We then tried out our artist's name in each font to see which we liked better.:

We think this font might be better to use in the booklet or something because it's not very bold and doesn't stand out much, which is important for an artist's logo.

We do like the look of this one but we're not completely sure. We're considering possibly making our own font, so that we can get the look we're after, but it was useful to see what we did and didn't like.

CD Analysis - Wallis Bird

Wallis Bird is an Irish folk/punk/indie artist, which  is quite different in genre to our artist, bu I thought that the theme of this cover is particularly interesting, as it includes unusual graphics and artwork.

This cover also uses a font that looks like handwriting, which looks really unusual and adds a personal touch to the album, making the consumer think that that might be the artist's handwriting. 

The artist's website and credits are also included on the cover...

As well as a barcode...

And the production company logos on the spine.

The combination of drawings and photos also give this album cover a scrapbooky feel, and the black background and white writing makes it look like the album is a chalkboard, an element i really like, as it makes me think of childhood and youth, which is the theme we are trying to show with the use of barbie dolls. 

The various illustrations throughout the cover also add a childlike theme, that I will find useful when making my cover.

There are also lots of credits for the band, which isn't usually done as much with mainstream pop music as the main artist is the focus of the music. This shows how indie musicians are usually a lot more reliant on their band, and tend to keep the same band for as much of their music as possible, whereas in pop the musicians are usually only employed for particular songs, meaning the solo artist doesn't develop much of a relationship with their band.

The use of lots of pictures also adds to the scrapbook feel of the cover.

I have found this album cover particularly useful as it has given me some inspiration for the themes of my album cover, and has shown me the difference between various genres and their look, and what is important to focus on in my genre.