Digipak Practice 2 - 01/12/12

During this week, I have continued with the practising of a Digipak that I begun to create a few days ago. The stage that I had gotten to then was a completed front cover, and an almost complete back cover and poster. This week, I have completed both the poster and back panel, in which I will talk through below.

Poster

To make the poster more realistic, I decided to add some images on the bottom of some places in which this album will be available. 

I cropped the images and made them the appropriate size on Photoshop, and then added them to the bottom of the album poster. I then had to add some more information at the bottom that I found out was needed when I analysed the previous tour/album posters. This information included where the album would be available, the website of the artist, as well as the important pieces such as the image of the actual album itself, and the name of the album and artist. 

This image above shows the poster once I had put all of the information on, and immediately the poster looks much more professional and better than the image that I had left it with last week. I then played around a bit with illuminating and highlighting the information before the artists name, and also the name of the album by giving it outer and inner glows. I did this because these are the most important pieces of information and would be what the audience should take notice of first.

Below shows a close-up of the finished poster:

I am actually very proud with this finished piece and think this would be a successful poster if it were to be the real thing. If I can produce my final poster to be anything like this I think I will be very happy with it. 

Back Cover

I also finished off the back panel of the album, by first choosing playing around with the position of Conor Maynard against the graffiti wall image that I had picked out last time. I decided to pick this image for the background as I thought it was a literal example of colour contrast and went well with the title of the album. The image I chose was the artist almost looking at the titles of the songs which would only influence the audience to read them even more. Below shows the different positions that I moved the image in to design the layout of it:

I also played around with the effects on the actual image and came up with an effect of making the image blacked out and shadowed. I thought this was quite interesting as back cover because it was the outline and shadow of the artist and made it unique and interesting to look at. Below shows the changes that I made when experimenting with this:

This image shows me adding a red outline to the image after creating an overall shadow. This added a darker edge but made the artist stand out against the background.

This is quite similar to above, but the outline is changed colours to match the front cover of the album in grey tones. 

Again, this has exactly the same shadow effect but without a glow around the edge.

I thought all of these were really helpful in allowing me to understand what some of the tools on Photoshop were capable of, and this has now opened the option of me using this same effect in my own Digipak.

After this, I then went onto the next important thing on the back of an album which is again the name of the album. This is just as important as the front, although for the back it should be slightly smaller so the audience can still understand what album it is, but be attracted to the design, the artist and the song titles too. 

I tried to use the same font and effects as I had used on the front cover for the same power and to keep it continuous, and then again I played around with what other things I could do to make it effective. 

I then changed the effect of the artist back to the original state and added the names of the album tracks along the right hand side. I think this worked better because I liked the original thought of the artist looking in the direction of the song titles. The picture below shows this changed, and also the added titles, with a different effect and style on the title too.

This image also captures the camouflage effect that I added to the main artist which alters the transparency of the background and the artist to merge them together.

I then had to remember the realistic traits that I had given to the album poster, and to do this for the back cover of the album I added the image of the company that signed Conor Maynard, and also a bar code at the bottom. I also decided to add the name of the artists website at the bottom so once the audience has finished reading the titles of songs, they are forced to reading the artists website and more likely to visit it.  

I then spent some time playing around with colour and style of the title, as I was slightly unhappy and felt there was something that needed to happen with the title to make it stand out more:

Below is the final image of the back panel of the album that I have designed, and again I am happy with how it has turned out. If there was anything else that I would change with this would maybe be the layout or styles of the song titles and the album title. 

Why have I done this?

This has been a great help in not only allowing me to understand the tools of Photoshop, but to also practice some ideas and to understand the process of making a successful Digipak. I want to do this so I can make all the mistakes during this practice, and learn about the tools and effects so when it comes to creating my own in the next few weeks, I can be certain of what I want to do. My plan next will be to create the inside cover of the CD, and try to put them altogether and come up with some positives and negatives. I will then go onto making my own Digipak which I am now very much looking forward to!