Examples of Digipaks

 Example 1- Lana Del Ray: Born To Die

This is the front cover of Lana Del Ray Born to die cover, it has a very simple layout of her being in front of a fence in what looks like a garden.

You can clearly see the artists Name in the cover it is behind her so it doesn't cover her hair. In the bottom of the front page is the song name born to die in red, it matches her lipstick which makes it not look out of place. Also the fact that the title is white and her shirt is white features like her hair and her lipstick stand out more.

The inside cover is just a picture of her doing a pose nothing much to say really i havent seen the music video.

Edit: Nope nothing in the video guess its just fan service to get a picture.

one thing i did see is that the colour scheme seems to be Blue, White and Red like the American flag. The fact that I didn't see this before means who ever tried to represent it is just bad, It should be so obvious that anyone should walk buy the album and recognise it in my opinion.

The Back of the cover is the song track that is in the same font as the album title in white against a red background. This stands out and is easy to read but i cant help feel that if you lay it out it would look really bad due the the front having a minimal amount of red and a picture to the back having the background red.

The fact that I cant find any advertisements for specific tracks that are like posters mean either they are not used very often or doesn't exist as that is the rule of the internet .

I found this advert for Wretch 32 the name is the largest and it has a font on its own, The background is split in half but the album name the botton consisting of a white wall and the top consisting of vector graphics and buildings in the sky. Hes body is edited to make it look like ink is infecting him. In the bottom left there is the cd cover and the bottom right has the stores it can be brought in.

Screen Grab to show where i am so far

These was my second attempt at making making a digipack, their is allot wrong with this and im glad im not using it. The artist looks like she was cut and paste on to the cd cover. Their was only 6 songs on the album which makes it half a an EP. The black background that was supposed to be a skyline of London( Which you didn't notice) is terrible. The picture is just akward at best and its not something that would attract the user to buy it becuase of the way i presented it. I didn't know what the format for the copryright/disclaimer looked like and after researching it i reliesed that i should have centred it. well i basically learned that everything thing on a digipak might as well be centred. The Advert is something that teachers should show students not to use, for some reason i didnt use my album cover on it. The black background isnt even a sillohoutte. And the ratings shouldn't be centred (weird) as you cant put the stars next to them and the word wrapping looks bad. The text that says when the album will be released is far too small as well with the title of the artist and the the album name. All this and the fact that the background is just blue and black is why i was afraid of losing marks just be showing this.

Digipak Fonts

I found this AMAZING website called dafont.com
It literally has the biggest range of fonts for every single occasion you could think of. It felt like christmas :') searching for the perfect font was pretty hard, as there were so many to choose from...

All the fonts on this website were free, there's even fonts that have been used on other artists albums.

I know minimalism is everything, less is more, keep it simple, and so on...

So I set my eyes on the 'basic' column, from there I could choose from:
San Serif
Serif
Fixed Width
Various

So I chose various because I was feeling lucky, over 30 pages of fonts came up.. Now was the tricky part. Which one?!

Analysis on Digipacks

Album Covers Analysis

In order to get an idea of what our target audience wants from a digipack, I looked online to see what album covers have been used to promote artists within the same genre as ours. Firstly starting with Rita Ora's album Ora, which was released in 2012 and was her debut album.

What we can note about these two is that the deluxe album(right)has the same picture, just a teeny bit smaller, and also that the writing and stylized decor is gold. The gold writing is emphasised by the fact it is the Deluxe album, this gives the audience a bit more to focus on, and for bigger fans to feel a bigger connection to the artist.

In our Do's of creating a successful digipack, we were also told the colour scheme should be kept to the maximum of 3 colours, as it could look tacky and overwhelming. The strong point about this album cover is that the picture itself of the artist, even though it is black and white, has a lot of depth to it due to shadows and highlights. The designers have then imposed the vibrant red(or gold)writing with a bold font. As it is a debut album, the artists name is usually always the main focus, apart from the artist herself.

This is the cover art for Rihanna's album Unapologetic. This simple mid shot of her over a white background suffices as the designers have incorporated stylized editing to show the album name, and also other words that resemble graffiti that may be links to lyrics in her featured songs. The colour palette is again simple, black and white writing.

This is Katy Perry's debut album cover One of the Boys. As we can note, again, her face and body are the main subject, as she is placed directly in the middle. They have also enhanced the colours but have kept to pastel like colours for the fonts and have given it a bubbly font, which could represent the type of music that would be on there.

Flickr Images

Here are some photos that I've just uploaded to Flickr, a photo website that shares your photos, or somewhere to store your photos :) We took lots and lots, to ensure we had high quality, good lighting and good angled shots. From these I then narrowed it down to my couple favourite, then I chose which ones would be suitable for what part of the digipak and advertisement. 

Photoshoot for Digipack

We took a series of photos of me on a plain white background, this way if we wanted something different in the back it would be easier to photoshop a realistic looking setting, even though we do like the white background.

As you can note we have kept the poses simple and the artists face is always the main focus of the picture as we have researched into Pop albums and they all use the artists face as the main subject.

Practice Digipaks

Here is the front cover of the practice digipak I made in class. I don't like the font as I don’t think that I really work with the genre and the album name doesn't look very good.
It could be improved as the image can be cut better and placed so that the spine doesn't cut the image the image also is very hard to cut out so I may try to avoid having a background and just used the whole of the original image. I could make the text larger and place it to cover more space and hide some of the letters behind the artist’s name. Having black clothes against a black background lacks contrast and as it is already nearly impossible to blend in I think I will not use black as a main colour.
The images are really awkward as well i feel like it takes up space better utilised with something else in the inside cover their doesnt need to be two pictures and one image has lighting while the others doesn't. I need to add alot off stuff to the digipak such as a spine, website, disclaimer/copyright.

Test for digipak front - Went horribly wrong (shouldnt use a mouse)

 In class i started working on redrawing a picture we took using a mouse i ended up with this result which is terrible i had no clue what i was doing with the hair so i decided to get rid of it.

I did a redesign and took out the hair colours i did some shading beneath the neck which made it look better I could touch up on th eblack shirt and make it look better but i still dont think that it has a rock/pop feel to the digipak i feel that the colours are not vibrant enough.

Im sorry for completely making you look bad Giselle forgive me please.

Edit: Picture I used

Oh my i need to use more shading or at least show where the light is coming from maybe have the hair brown and make it so you can see the nose.

all our pics

javaylprimus' photostream on Flickr.

Ancillary Ideas

I have been playing around in photoshop and thimnking of ideas for things to put in the digipak.

Playing with fonts

I decided to look online at the fonts and see which kinds of fonts might suit my digipak. Playing with bold and normal and making sure to keep it simple.