Album Artwork

Final Album Artwork

Research and Planning

For the Digipak a lot of organisation had to go into this part of the project.

In the pre-production stages, a lot of communication went on due to

figuring out what everyone wanted to do; we did this using different

media technologies. Some of the software included Google, researching

similar products band’s album artwork, Prezi, MyFonts, Photoshop and

Youtube.

GoogleLooking at similar products during this process is crucial as you need to see what fits in with a certain genre. On my blogger account, I created a SlideShare where I looked into similar album artwork, with artists from the Indie genre. On google in the search engine, I was able to google image all of the artist’s Digipak’s (artists that my group had already discussed). They were very easy to find which was helpful as it saved time and I was able to compare them nicely. I found a correlation of a dark colour scheme and none of the album artwork featured a very ‘posey’ photoshoot for the artists.

Was this useful?

Google was extremely helpful at this point as I was able to easily access

these products without having to waste a lot of time. From the picture across

you can see that this was useful research as they all seem to link and I

personally thought at this point that our colour scheme should be dark as this is what seems to their target audience, which is the same as ours (25-30 year old males). Moreover, on Google we

were able to find this research, meaning that Google was our first source research if we had any queries.

Production

At this stage, we only honestly used one source of Media technology which was a Canon DSLR. This was in order to take pictures of our band for the music video.

We decided we wanted to use this Camera as it was a very high quality camera that would look most professional and sophisticated for an older target audience. For the photoshoot, we communicated with our band through email and asked them to wear their own clothes which would fit in with the genre of indie. For the photoshoot we used four Thomas Cyc lights in the photography studio which would look extremely flattering on the band. We knew we wanted them to look good as our secondary audience is Females, due to the band being quite attractive, so we knew that they key to this photoshoot was to make them look good. We initially took group pictures as them as a ‘unit’ but then realised it would look too much like a pop genre if we had them looking posed together. Therefore Ashen suggested if we took individual pictures of them and created something on photoshop which is a big different and would fit in with our genre better.

Doing a very minimalistic photoshoot helped with the ‘look’ of the band as you were able to easily photoshop the pictures. The pictures produced were very high quality which automatically made them look professional and appeal to our target audience. Moreover, from looking at similar products, even if there were pictures of the band on the album they would be quite interesting and different which is the look we were going for.

Post ProductionThe post production part of the process was the point where the whole ‘look’ of the artist came together. After looking at similar products we discussed and realised that a dark colour scheme would not have been a very big success as when we tried out a couple of options it looked more like a ‘rock’ and ‘punk’ kind of album.Therefore we used Dyer’s Star Theory to decide in order for them to look organic, we needed to create a very minimal album artwork. The media technologies we used were a memory stick, Photoshop and Email.

PhotoshopWe used photoshop for all of the Album Artwork, which included the photos for the band and also all of the fonts. As you can see we decided on a red colour scheme throughout which made the artwork look very professional and tidy.

Here is a link on how to change the font on photoshop: https://youtu.be/LJyqQ3BT_bM

We decided not to photoshop and airbrush any of the band’s faces as we thought this would look like too much of a pop genre as opposed to an organic band. Also by merging all of their faces together, it created a sense of mystery to the band which would fit in with the indie genre of not giving too much away.