Digipak Design

This post features screenshots of the first digipak design which i have created. This digipak was created using photographs which i had taken from my first shoot in Iceland, as well as one photo which was taken on the second shoot but edited to fit the look and feel of the Iceland shoot photos. The photos used are not stills from my video. The photos were taken with this and the magazine poster in mind, i have multiple versions using different settings to see which work best and these are the best versions of the shot which i have. These photos are also edited in photoshop before i imported them into illustrator. The way i edited these photos was firstly slightly tweaking the levels to make the photos more defined and bold. Then i slightly altered the brightness and contrast to again get a more defined and stronger image, there was not a lot of editing done to the Iceland photos because they didn't need a heavy edit on them. With the shot from the second shoot (image on inside of digipak) i edited this similarly however i changed this to black and white and tweaked that to make it as similar to the Iceland images as i could.

The first screenshot shown is my first draft of the digipak, the aspect missing from this version is the inside cover side which has the cd on it. I am happy with the choice of photos for the front and back, i think they work well together and are quite bold and strong photographs. I like the first image because it is a striking image, it shows a man walking alone along an empty beach, this person is not the artist (Josh) because he wasn't in Iceland with me but anyone who didn't know that would believe it is. I know the person in the image and i asked them to walk along the beach so i could get this shot and in happy with how it turned out. It is good that the image is striking bold because this is important for a front cover,. The image is very fitting to the genre of music and works well with conventions of this genre. 

I like the back image and think it works well as a back cover. It links to the front cover because it is the same place just looking the other way which i think adds a nice effect and would work well looking at a physically copy. The image has a lot of open negative space which i believe is good for back covers because it leaves room for a tracklist to be clear on show rather than the tracklist over the top of something and blocking it out or not being able to see the tracklist clearly. 

For the text on the front cover i put it as white because i prefer white text and usually think white text looks the nicest on top of images. I didn't want to cram the front cover with lots of text because otherwise i didnt want the picture to loose its effect so i wanted the text to be there but be subtle. The white text however might be too subtle and a little bit too hard to see. I will try out black text and see if it looks better or if it doesn't look as professional. the same applies to the back text. I like how the back text looks and think that it is clearer than the front but i will try another version with black test to compare. 

Below is a screenshot from the second design of the first version of the digipak. The only think changed here is i have added the album name, because at this time i have not thought of an album name which would suit this best i looked at some familiar artists and have used one of Ben Howards album names to be put there until i have my own name. I also changed one for the inside sections colour. In the first screenshot this section is white. I changed this to test if it would look better. I drop-picked the colour from the other image on the inside and the idea was that it would look like the image carries of over.