Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product with ancillary texts?

This is a screen shot from my music video ‘I’ll Show You New York’ This is the front cover

for my digipak

Digipak DesignResearch into my Digipak:A digipak consists of the front cover of a CD or DVD case, inside panels and a back panel for the song titles to be displayed. In order to design my own digipak, I had to research other similar artists (artists of the same genre) to see what type of images or photos are used, especially on their front cover. The first aspect of the album that the target audience will notice is the front panel so for me it had to be eye-catching and appealing to this specific audience. Therefore, I searched artists such as Ed Sheeran, Paolo Nutini and Leonard Cohen to get a general gist of the type of images that are on the front cover.

James Morrison’s album ‘I won’t let you go’ includes a photo of the artist playing guitar which is a common theme throughout my particular music video so gave me ideas on what sort of photos to take. I decided to take pictures of media student Thomas Block dressed as chosen artist Daniel Cope holding a guitar in a playing position to imitate this strong connotation of the acoustic genre. This is an example of some of the picture I have taken to reinforce genre and intertextuality.

James Morrison’s album cover

Example of a photo I have taken to emphasise genre and close up of the artist

Creating my DigipakTo create my digipak I took a number of photos of the ‘artist’ to see which one would work best or be the most interesting.

These are some of my attempts at creating a strong front panel:

Although I like these particular photos, I didn’t think they were strong enough to be a front cover. I wanted an eye catching image which would stand out. I personally don’t think these images would intrigue me enough to buy them.

Original IdeaThis was my original edit for my digipak:

This was the original photo which I initially chose to be my front cover. The picture was taken with an SLR camera and a strong light focussed on the artist to create a dramatic effect.

This was my edited version of it and as you can see there wasn’t much to edit apart from the brightness and contrast on Adobe Photoshop. I named this album ‘spotlight’ as the lighting resembles a spotlight and how the artist’s popularity has increased so therefore he is very much in the spotlight. The font was plain and too basic for me and the image on the whole wasn’t strong enough.

Final DesignThis is the inspiration for my final design:

This is an image of the album cover my artist has created. It features him with his red checked shirt and appealed to me because its rotation was unusual. I like the reduction of saturation so decided to base my digipak design on his one.

To create this effect I took a basic photo of Tom’s face, upper body and guitar.