Presenting Our Digipaks

In Friday's lesson we all had to present our digipaks to the class and talk about how we created it and how everything linked in with our music video. After presenting my digipak to the class i got some audience feedback from my class mates to see what they thought of it. One of my class mates pointed out the fact that i used 'Aly&Aj' in my links rather than 'The Capulets'. I'm glad that she pointed this out because I had not noticed this myself. Apart from that everything else seemed to be fine.

I had a close look at my previous digipak and decided that i wasn't so sure about whether i was happy with it so i created a new one from scratch using PhotoShop. I'm happy with how it looks and prefer it better to my previous design as i think my new one looks more professional and fits in better with our theme.

For my front cover I decided to use more laid back photos that we had taken on our days/nights out which fits in with our natural look. My previous digipak had photos of us which we had taken in the studio we had set up which didn't really go with our music video and the way we wanted to represent ourselves. I believe that this digipak design works better than the previous one because it's bold, more colourful

I decided to put our studio photos on the back cover and added a film strip effect with a gradient colour over them to make it look more quirky and fun. I didn't want to put these photos on the front cover of my digipak because they are more staged and not very natural looking compared to the ones on my front cover.

I've kept the same production company logo as before and have added fan page links for Facebook, Myspace and our music website all named TheCapulets. I've also used a girly font for our song titles in keeping with our feminine theme.

I decided to keep the CD design i previously made for my first digipak as I believe that it fits in well with my final digipak design and follows the same colour scheme.

For the inside left of my digipak I decided to include a 'book of lyrics & photos' section which would be a little book that you'd pull out with the lyrics of the songs on our CD and some photos of the artists. I chose to do this to make it more personal and because I have come across lyric books in digipaks before which i quite like. I tried to keep my digipak consistent with it's black and pink themed background. I added the same airbrush effect to the background by creating a messy zig zaggy look. I then added the photo of me that was taken whilst I was setting up the studio for our photoshoot. I was actually holding the blank board when the photo was taken, I did not add that in myself. I added a semi circle to the top of the board to make it look like a slot and also added the text on the front using a feminine font.

Finished Digipak

Here is my completed digipak

The top half of my digipak design is everything that will be seen on the outside when unfolded and the bottom row is what the inside of my digipak looks like. Starting from the top left image which is the front cover of my digipak, i decided to go against the normal idea of having a photo of the artists on the front cover because most artists seem to do that in order to be recongnised by their face and to become more familiar with audiences. However, I didn't want to do what is already really common and expected as most girl groups always tend to have a photo of themselves on the front cover, so do the artists we're looking at 'Aly&Aj'.

As you can see all I've put on my front cover is our band name/logo as this is what I would like everyone to recognise us by. Another reason to why I decided to keep my front cover logo based is because our logo is quite colourful and bold so i didn't want anything to take the attention away from that and didn't want it to look extremely busy. I also wrote 'Deluxe Edition' on the front to make it look and feel more professional and official.

This was my first digipak template and a rough idea of the look i was going for. But after i went back on it several times i came up with new ideas and decided to change/add different things to it. Below you will see the step by step development and changes of my digipak ideas.

List Of Song Ideas

Here are my list of song ideas for my didgipak, Andrea also came up with some ideas that are on her blog. We both want to use the same song titles to make it look more professional and make it feel like a real digipak. We will be having a discussion about both our ideas and will pick our favourites.

Live Laugh Love
Dear karma
Keep on wondering
Like the rest
Those were yesterdays feelings
Todays your day
What we love
Just wanna have fun
Only a matter of  time
We're young, wild & free
I'm done, have fun
Dream big
Nothing to lose
Come alive in the night time
Born to love

Below are the ones we came to the decision of using after collecting some audience feedback from students in our media class:

The Potential Breakup Song
Smile For Me
Stay Away Cupid
Those WereYesterday's Feelings
Dear Karma
We're Young Wild & Free
You're the Sun on a Cloudy Day
Live Laugh Love
Green Eye Envy
Watched Me Walk Away
Cross Your Heart
Born to Love

Digipak Photos

Andrea and I spent Monday's lesson taking photos for our digipaks. I asked my photography teacher if he'd give us permission to use the room to set up the studio and take some photos for our media and thankfully he did. So we set up the white roll background, got out the lights, tripod and we used my camera. As we both needed to be in the photos together one of our friends kindly took some photos for us.

The whole purpose of these photos were to look professional and done in a studio and i think we managed to achieve this look. The theme for the day was black and white, I wanted to use black and white themed photos for my digipak because I want the colourful elements such as our logo etc to stand out.

Below is a sneak peak!

Digipak Wordle

Rather than writing a plain list of ideas i created a wordle to make it more interesting and fun to look at and read. I've used specific colours to represent the main colours you will find on my digipak.

Digipak's in our genre

ELECTROPOP!

 Below are some digipak's in the genre of our chosen song for our music video.

 This is Katy Perry's 'Teenage Dream' album digipak. I really like this one in particular because not only does it have the colour pink in it (my favourite colour) it really works well with the whole album and gives off a very girly feel. The choice of pastel colours work well together and the photos of her are vital as she is the main singer throughout the whole album. The colours, design and everything else goes a lot with our theme too so my own digipak may use similar elements such as the photos, girly colours etc.

Analysis of a digipak

Michael Jackson

I've chosen to analyse Michael Jackson's 'This Is It' digipak because he is by far my favourite artist. Another reason to why i have chosen to analyse this particular digipak is because the album was released during or after Michael Jackson's illness and death. As a result of this it means this is his last ever album which means this is a very special one.

 

Digipak

Definition of a Digipak:

Digipacks are a type of CD packaging made out of card stock or other heavy paper/cardboard material. Digipacks can flip open like a book, or it can have three parts, so that one portion of the packaging opens to the right and one to the left, with the CD in the center portion. Usually, the portion of the digipack that hold the CD is made of plastic like a traditional jewel case CD - the plastic part is simply attached to the paper background.

Digipacks were first created by MeadWestvaco, and their product, called Digi-Pak, is trademarked. However, as the format became more popular and began to be used by more manufacturers, the generic "digipack" came to be used to describe all soft CD packaging.

Digipacks have pros and cons:

• They look nice, and many bands and labels like to use them for aesthetic reasons. The three section digipack sleeves opens up more design options because there is more room. However, they're more expensive than traditional liner notes and jewel cases.
  
• Digipacks don't crack like jewel cases do, but they will rip and eventually the paper begins to peel apart and separate.
  
• The trays in digipacks break much more often then in jewel cases. There's not as much protection since the outer portion of made of paper, so the teeth that hold the CD in place crack and fall out easily.
  
• When the teeth of the tray does break in a digipack, the CD falls out of the bottom of the digipack, because unlike jewel cases, there is nothing to hold it in.
  
• Digipacks can be more environmentally friendly than jewel cases because they can be made of recycled paper - however, they aren't always in fact made in this way.
  

Digipacks look great, but if you're just starting out and money is tight, looking for ways to cut your manufacturing costs is important. Stretching your budget to because you like digipacks aesthetically is not a good investment.

(I found this definition on About.com)