Digipak and Advert: Initial and original ideas

Rough ideas:To create our digipak and advert for our band, we decided to come up with two ideas and then choose one to build on and expand to make the final product.

We drafted our two ideas onto paper first and annotated them, giving us ideas of things like colour schemes, fonts and other visual elements.

This was one of the ideas that we didn't go ahead with. We rejected this idea because even though we wanted to create the identity (of the band) to be different and unique, we thought this was too simple. We decided to create a hard copy of the rejected idea anyway, to see how it looked and we could sue any ideas that we liked on the actual digipak.

Typography and colour:In order to create our digipak and advert we had to think about the technical and visual elements and how they would relate to our genre, indie/alternative. We searched through different fonts and chose one that we wanted to represent the band. We wanted a simple font, to represent the idea that the band care about the music more than how they look to the audience so we didn’t want the font to look too ‘over the top’ as it could be suggested that the band are trying to distract the audience away from the music.

The colour scheme was easier to choose as we knew we wanted basic colours, like black, grey and white. We took inspiration from other videos that we watched, such as 7 by Catfish and The Bottlemen and Settle Down by The 1975, which were both in black and white (the music videos). For digipaks, The 1975 one was in black and white, something the band are recognised by and we found an Arctic Monkeys on which was in very muted tones, like white, black with hints of green/blue. We chose to have a black and white based digipak, with black and white pictures to go with the white etxt. We originally were going with a coloured digipak on a black background but we thought that the grey scale black and white images went better although we chose to do one coloured image on the inlay of the digipak, to add a pop of colour to add to the originality of the band’s identity. For our advert we decided to use a more grey toned scale with a green tone, which we took inspiration from an advert from The Killers. We liked the colour scheme of the poster and we thought that it would be immersive for the audience.

Digipak idea 1: this is one idea that we came up with for the digipak however we chose not to use this idea because we wanted to show

the band’s full identity, including outfits.

Digpak idea 2: for the second idea, we learnt how to improve from our first digipak idea and decided to include the whole band’s image, with full length long shots and medium long shots of them. We used colour in this version of the digipak as we decided to adhere to some of the ‘norms’ and put it all in

black and white as this is something we found to be evident in a lot of indie/alternative digipaks.

Digipak idea 2: as mentioned before, we decided to use a pop of colour in the inlay of the digipak. Not only is it eye catching but from the outside of the digipak it looks like a normal

indie, black and white themed CD but when opened up the pop of colour shows that we wanted to challenge some of the stereotypes in order to show how our band is different.

We included elements that we found on almost all digipaks, such as: a list of songs on the album including the song we have chosen to create a music video for, the record label logo that we have chosen, text (companies, associations), a barcode and the band name/title of the album. These are conventional aspects of a CD digipak so we included them to make our digipak look authentic.

Real digipak: we wanted to use our second idea as our actual digipak but we wanted to show a stronger sense of continuity so we decided to change the front and back inlays of the digipak. We used the same

image as the advert for the front of the digipak to show the link between the two print adverts. We decided to do the whole colour scheme in black and white as well because we thought it’d be better to adhere to some genre conventions and we thought that black and white looked a lot better than with colour on the whole.

Rough ideas:For the advert, we knew what idea we wanted from the beginning, so we decided to plan it out in rough and then play around with different versions of the idea.

We used the same fonts and colour scheme as we did for the digipak as we wanted to be consistent with our planning. We also took pictures that we may have wanted to use for the advert instead but we decided to elaborate on the idea of the merged face pieces as it was quirky and original, two connotations of our band.

These are some of the images that we took. We wanted the band to look off guard, to show their relationship as friends is strong and this would give the impression that the band work well together and most likely make good music because they work so well together.

The Cutaways

The CutawaysUncut

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Advert idea 1: we took pictures of the band member’s faces and cut them into equal sections – the band is called ‘The Cutaways’ so the equal cuts showed that the band are all equal members too. We thought this idea was quite original however it took some time to perfect because we needed to make sure the pictures were all the same size. We used

Photoshop to edit, which shows our range of ICT skills being used and it allowed us to get the idea exactly how we wanted it.

THE CUTAWAYS

UNCUT

Real advert: the real advert is an elaboration of idea 1, as we really liked this idea but we thought it could be changed to be better. We used a filter to blur out the features slightly to create the idea of equality again and the filter is cool and different, quite unexpected.

We decided to make some changes with the typography on the advert, by moving the text to the side so that the main focus is on the image. We also included logos from music streaming websites and apps as this shows that the band are up to date with social media and things like that so the target audience would be able to find the band and their songs/album with ease. The black background and white font link with the digipak too, showing the consistency.

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