Final Digi-pack

Digi-pack

This is our completed album digi-pack. We decided to keep it simple and only have four panels.

Top Left; as the song 'Heaven' is dedicated to the artists friend and is the main song on the album we decided to put a note so the consumers knows that the album is dedicated to the artists friend.

Top Right; for this panel we wanted to keep it quite plain as the other panels have quite a lot of content on it. Therefore we decided to to use a photo of the artist with her signature over the top. This makes the album look more personal to the consumer.

Scaling Our Print Products

Scaling Our Print Products

We want our print products to be as realistic as possible as if we was pitching the idea of an album to someone. We scaled our products to the size of a CD panel, to do this we researched the sizes which were 12cmx12cm. Next, using Microsoft word we used a ruler tool to measure each side. We found that we had to crop some of the sides down as they were not all equal. The reason we used Microsoft was because it is easy and quick to use. 

Final Print Product: Advert In A Magazine

Advert In A Magazine

For our advert in a magazine we chose to have a landscape advert which would cover two pages. We liked the idea of this as it is more noticeable when flicking through a magazine.  

Process of creating the advert

 After looking through previous A-Level media products and existing ones online we began to design our advert. The first thing we did was insert the picture of Jess walking down the path and made it slightly transparent so the picture wasn't so vivid, we thought that this would be an effective photo to use as Jess is in the centre so we could have the writing around the outside of her. 

Originally, we used the same font as we have used on our album cover for this (Seravek Extra Light) but we felt that it didn't look like a real media product, due to other adverts for albums having more complex titles. We decided to do some more research and looked at real life adverts for albums in magazines, for example Jessie J's - Who You Are album and Ellie Goulding's - Lights album. 

Using 1001fonts.com, we experimented with lots of different fonts before we found one that looked most effective with our advert. Before inserting this however, we decided that the background didn't look bright enough so we inserted some lens flares on Premier Pro, which by inserting the lense flare in the top left corner, this has made the photo look as if the sun is shining down on Jess which links to the album cover and the style of it. We then inserted the font and played around with until we was happy with how it looked. 

After looking at real album adverts, we decided to include a star rating, a small quote from a newspaper, and information about a certain song on the album. We also wrote 'Includes Number One Hit On iTunes "Heaven"' as this is song in our music video and wanted that to be also advertised. For this we used the same font as the album cover as the information is only small, and having the new font we used for the titles on the advert would not have looked right. 

Another feature of an advert of an album is a small picture of the album cover itself, along with the price, barcode and where it is available on it, which was used on the You Me at Six album. We decided to use the "Available on iTunes" logo because in modern society that is where most people buy their music, and no longer go into a music store to buy it. We put this price at £9.99 as that is the typical price for an album on iTunes as well as in shops if you were to buy the physical product.

After much discussion we felt like our advert didn't fulfill the brief as much as we wanted it to. Therefore we decided to change our advert to portrait. The reasoning behind this was that if we were to use a landscape advert the middle part would be lost in the seem of the magazine and could potentially lose the effectiveness. However, we didn't want to completely redesign so we just recycled our original advert by opening a new document and copying each section over. This advert will only be covering one page of a magazine however it will contain the same information as before but wont look as empty as the previous advert did as it was much larger. 

Again, we played around with the design and tailored it to our liking. Instead of having the background in the centre we found that it worked well being placed to the right and having all the writing on the left, including our album cover.

Task 12: Audience Feedback of 5 print products

Audience Feedback 

As we are biased to our CD cover we decided to play with the colours and arrangement of the cover in order to find out what people liked best. Therefore we added a cover which had colour, a sepia effect as well as getting rid of the black and white effect (which we liked). We printed all 5 images off and asked people to pick which one they liked best and why. We didn't explain what genre or style of music the CD was as we wanted our results to be based on the look of the CD case alone. Here are our results...

• We found that the most popular design was in fact the one in colour (the middle one) the reason which was said for why they liked it the best was purely because it is in colour. Many said that if they were in a shop going to buy a CD they would be more drawn into one that was colourful. 
• A very small minority of people chose the black and white covers (top right and bottom left).
• Several people asked what type of genre the music was however we didn't tell them until after they picked a cover. Many people said they would of picked the black and white cover if they knew the style of music was emotional and slow. 

Final Print Product: Album Digipack

Progress of Final Print Product

From our previous audience feedback we discovered that our audience was drawn in by the colourful CD cover. In order to improve our product we decided to scrap the black and white effect and make it more colourful. 

Firstly we removed the grayscale effect. Next on photoshop we carefully removed the green background which left us with the single image of Jess looking up towards the sky with her hands in her pockets. Although we wanted her to be more colourful we didn't want to use that background. After looking at Taylor Swifts albums for inspiration we decided to use a orange toned scene to be the background for the cover. We then overlay the photo of Jess over the top to make it look like she was already standing there. 

We wanted to put a lense flare on the photo to capture it looking like she was standing outside when the sun was setting as this is not as harsh as the previous background. We wasn't sure how to add a lense flare to our photo however we used our initiative and use Premier Pro to import the photo and add a lense flare. We then screen-shotted this and imported it back onto the front of the CD cover. We then repeated this for the back cover so the front and the back covers would link together.

We then wanted to know whether our audience still preferred the previous cover they picked (the bottom one out of the two) in the last audience feedback. Therefore we asked a handful of people to pick between the two above covers to see if they would like our new cover which they did. 

We were really glad that the majority of people liked our new cover however there was still a slight problem that a couple of people mentioned. This was that they didn't like the lense flare ring that surrounded Jess's torso. We agreed then that we needed to make it more natural as the lense flare was too bright for the photo therefore we went back onto Premier Pro and softened the flare. 

Once we did that we imported the photo once again in order to complete our final cover. 

Task 11: First Draft Of Print Products

First Draft Of Print Products

After we finished editing, we began on our print products. We started by looking through photos/videos we had of Jess (the artist) from when we filmed which we discovered a photo of her walking down a path with the back to the camera. We liked this shot and thought it would be good on the album as it is helps brand her as an artist, as she is wearing the hat, coat and heels which is her signature style. 

We began by going on photo shop and cropping out the background of the shot of her walking away because we didn't want the cover to reflect the music video only, as it is in album cover and not a single cover. As we was focusing on the front cover first we inserted the picture in order to add titles. We then picked out a font that was quite simple however to allow it to stand out we added a shadow to give it more depth and allow it to pop out of the page instead of having it flat to the image.

 We chose to have the background grey because the songs on the album are more slower and emotional songs rather than up tempo songs, so we thought a darker shade would look most effective. The photo of Jess on its own in colour did not suit the style of the rest of the cover as it didn't go with the grey tones. Initially we didn't know where we was going to place to cropped picture of Jess however after playing around with some effects we managed to find a structure which we liked. We duplicated the picture so there was three of them in total then placed them next to each other in a horizontal line across the front CD cover. We then tried to put the photos in black and white, but it looked too plain and clashed with the background. We then adjusted the transparency in all three images of Jess and made them slowly fade, like a ombre effect, across the page to made it look like shes slowly fading away.

We then started on the back cover. We found a medium close up shot of Jess we took while filming which we really liked because it also helped brand the artist. This shot is similar to the one we drew in our hand-drawn draft of our CD cover however we decided to put this photo in black and white effect to blend it with the front cover. We used the same text font as we did for the front cover, although this does not stand out as much as the writing is a lot smaller although we did put a thin shadow around it.

Also on the back we used a barcode and our production company name as that is what is included on a real album back cover, along with small print at the bottom about copyright issues etc. We decided to have our song list going horizontally to stick with the theme of horizontal lines.

We then decided we were going to create more drafts of the covers and then get audience feedback on them. We started by creating another cover that swapped around the front and back from our previous design. When this was finished we actually preferred this designed, as in the previous design the front cover looked quite bare and plain where as with the picture of Jess on the front it stands out more. Also on the back cover due to the song list, there isn't much of a background needed so the 3 outlines fitted well here and on the previous cover the words got lost into the picture of Jess due to the variety of tones on her outfit and the trees where as in the new one they stand out. Therefore we decided the cover below was our favorite out of the two.

Task 11: Creating Print Artefacts

Hand Drawn Drafts Of Print Products 

This is our first draft of our print product which will be a CD digipak. We wanted to keep it simple and not have too much going on on the cover. We decided to incorporate the artist and her name on the cover to sell and brand the artist as much as possible. We named the CD 'one night only' as we thought it would fit the type of CD well, as well as it being memorable like a slogan. As it is a album cover and not a single cover for the music video we are producing we didn't want it to reflect our music video as we wanted it to be more universal to the whole album although we did want to pull through elements such as the black hat into the cover as we thought it would help brand the artist as it gives her a trademark style which is more memorable. 

For our second print product we designed a plain, yet effective front cover. The reason we used a blue ombre effect around the edges of the cover was because we referenced a singers spotlight and wanted to use that as inspiration for our cover. We thought this might look effective if we just had the writing in the middle however it doesn't help brand the artist in anyway therefore we decided not to use this one. 

Our final design was a close up shot of Jess in her signature hat. We wanted this cover to be quite soft and gentle which was inspired by Leona Lewis's album 'Spirit'. However the only problem with this cover is that we did not know where to incorporate the text or what colour to have the text as we didn't want it to cover her face. But if we had it covering her hat, having a white text would blend in with the background in either corner but black wouldn't be possible either due to the colour of the hat. For this design we would need to try a variety of colours to see which worked best.