DigiPak Development

Before creating the design for our DigiPak, a DigiPak  template was downloaded off a website called 'Discmaker'. This presented me with many guide lines, cut lines etc. These lines and additional information could be deleted or hidden easily within the 'layers' section.   

Our DigiPak:

Our front cover: This is a photograph taken by ourselves using a Nikon DSLR camera that displays two themes included within our music video. The image was inserted using the 'place' under the 'file' section. It is a convention that general theme runs throughout music video, DigiPak and magazine advertisement so displaying these themes was important. The two themes are the use of scenic shots/the countryside and the inclusion of 'emoji' images. The emoji PNG image was simply saved off the internet and inserted using 'place', and then was re-sized using the shift key (reduces size proportionately). In terms of colour, we decided to finalise our piece in black and white (edited using Photoshop) simply because we preferred the effect and made the yellow emoji image stand out signifying its importance and relevance. In terms of font, we decided to go with the 'moonlight' font which we downloaded off the website 'Defont'. Many other fonts such as 'suzuki', 'razor' and 'uzuzi' were downloaded and tested, however we felt 'thruster' worked. Due to 'thruster' being a finer, san serif font, it doesn't take attention away from the background image. A common convention of DigiPaks is that the font is the same on both front and back covers and often the inside too therefore we decided to follow this convention. We also followed the convention of including both album and artist name on the front cover. The size of font for the artist name is also commonly found to be larger than the song name (we included this). In terms of the colour of the font, we began with a dark grey/black font. This however didn't stand out in due to the darkness of the background image so we decided to change it to white. We found this stood out well.

Our back cover: This is another photograph taken by ourselves using a Nikon DSLR camera that follows the theme of the front cover by being a countryside image. The photograph correlates with the front covers photograph creating consistency/fluency of theme (common convention). Another similarity between front and back cover is the black and white coloured theme (again edited using Photoshop). We also decided to keep the same font based on the fact its a common convention. One other common convention of almost all DigiPak is the inclusion of record label information (logos, website, email etc). Based on this common convention, we decided to incorporate it ourselves. Logos for 'Playaz', 'Shogun Audio' and 'Hardware Productions' were included. Once inserted, the logos were 'image traced' then 'expanded'. The images could then be ungrouped which allowed us to delete the backgrounds to these images. Barcodes are included on the back cover of all digi-packs, therefore being essential for us to include one. The decision of positioning our titles centrally simply was based on personal preference.

Our disc-holder: This section doesn't have many common conventions therefore allowing us to express our creation and originality. The use of 'emojis' plays a large role within our music video. Based on this we felt more inclusion of emojis was essential. The creation of this started by saving a chosen image off the internet and 'placing' the image onto Adobe Illustrator. To make it in the shape of a circle, a clipping mask was required. This was done by drawing and re-sizing a circle over the image, select both circle and image, then right click - 'make clipping mask'. We felt the emoji images may stand out more if we put them infront of a black background.

Our inside cover: This is another section that doesn't include many common conventions for us to follow. We decided to go with handwritten styled lyrics for a section of the song we used for our music video. A general convention of this idea is the use of a 'handwritten' styles font. We downloaded this font of the website 'Defont'. The small hand-drawn image of sheep correlates with our theme of the countryside. The small speakers also represent the musical aspect of our product.