Evaluation Activity 1: Extension (part one) - Diranjeet Sohi

Discuss how your digipak and advertisement use typical conventions of layout.

Digipak

In order to create a digipak for our music video we needed to gather much research on typical digipaks. We looked at mainstream artists such as Eminem and Madonna, and how they incorporated the particular style and genre of the artist. The cover of Madonna's Celebration digipak was quite vibrant whereas Eminem's use of colour was a lot darker in Curtain Call, reflecting them as artists as well as the overall feel of their music.

When designing our digipak we decided to use similar conventions.

For example on our front cover, we included artist iconography to make our digipak as recognisable as possible. The font

of the album title tied into theme of the album itself. This was a common convention within our research. Eminem and Madonna both use ic

onography to play on their popularity and success. Unlike mainstream popular artists such as Madonna and Eminem, we did not use any images of the artist UNKLE, thus subverting the usual conventions we discovered in our research. Instead we used an image of the bear which stars in the music video.

The artwork and colour theme needs to reflect either the mood of the music or genre used by the artist. We established that UNKLE were trip/hop electronica, thus the colour theme had to portray this. The main track, Lonely Soul was quite melancholy. We used dark blue to reflect the genre of electronica and black because the mood was quite dark. This was a typical convention we regularly came across. The particular image used depicted the bear's isolation,

as shown in the video. We used photoshop to give the image a slightly blue tint.

A digipak offers more to the customer. Instead of just a CD, there are compartments with album art and a DVD of the artist's videos/performances. These would most likely be included on the left and right inner slides on either side of the centre tray. In order for our digipak design to appear unified, we kept the colour scheme consistant throughout. The inner images of Eminem's digipak are dark and suggestive of violence and inner conflict which match the themes of his music. Keeping true to

conventions, we used the colour scheme of our front cover.

Using photoshop brushes, we created abstract images to suit the mood of the album. The tray was to be more simple because most of the time, the CD would be covering it.

So there was no use of another image. Some digipaks chose to use images on their CD tray and some didn't. We decided we would just stick to the colour scheme and make the tray black. The tray simply had the artist iconography and album title.

The back panel consisting of the track listing again kept to the colour scheme. We used an image of a brick wall to blend in with the front cover image. On the other hand, we had to darken the image from red bricks to black and define the edges with blue. The font was kept exactly like the font from the front cover to be consistant. Following the convention of putting additional important information at the back, we added a barcode, the label logo as well as a disclaimer. The only information missing was the timing of the tracks.

Finally, the panel beside the back panel contained images of musical instruments.

Like the other images, we added a blue tint so that it didn't look out of place.