Designing My Digipak by cdeabr1 on emaze

Designing My Digipak

The template

This is the template that I used for my digipak. The simple and common four panel digipak layout is easy to follow and use.

Producing the Digipak

In November I began to plan for my digipak. I mistakenly jumped right into my digipak without planning and began to use the images that I took in my first day of my photoshoot. When I came to editing my work onto my template I decided that I didn't like my original plans and felt as though I hadn't planned it properly.

I decided that I needed to do things the old fashioned way, put pen to paper and translate my thoughts onto my digipak sheet that I printed out so that I can have a rough idea as to which direction I want my work to go in.

Digipak Planning

After reasearching indie-pop artist's digipaks I got an understanding as to what I wanted my bands digipak to look like and what it should be looking like.

These are the two main ideas that I came up with whilst planning what I wanted my digipak to look like. I figured that I will be needing to do a photohoot with my band and taking different aspects into consideration such as the 'reflective' look of the CD and locations to film in as it would be unlikely that I would find a palm tree in south-west London.

Applying My Plans

I decided to stick with my first digipak plan as it was the digipak that stuck mostly to the genre conventions and was the easiest and most effective plan that I had.

the digipak above is the digipak I first started working on after taking photos with the band members. I decided that I didn't like the colours that I was using along with the way that I edited the band members head; so I started again from scratch.

I chose to change the original pink colour of my kaleidoscope that would suit the style of all my band members. I also just used the original coloured images of my band members and edited their images on photoshop. I put them alongside each other and cropped their images into a band.

I ended up having to change the colours that I had originally used on the gels in front of the lights that reflected off the band members faces. The colours were too bright and vivid for the dark colour scheme that I had for the digipak. Whilst researching indie bands and I discovered that most of the editing on their photos had cooler-blue tones and had a faded look to them. I thought that it would only be fitting to change the images to fit that stereotype, but to still have the interesting different coloured lighting on their faces. I changed the colours to fit the colour scheme. So I toned down the oranges, reds and green and mainly increased the blues and pink and added more peach colours. In the end, I was extremely happy with how the images of my band memebers came out on my digipak front cover.

Nearly Finished

Finished/completed product

CD Design

The inner part of the cd design has a white circle around the hole. This was used so that I could use the 'O' shape as the O for my album title 'O M E N S'.

I also made the outer third of my CD reflective which is why it is extremely colourful. this will make the CD look different and interesting.

Along with this the circumference of the CD will have a matte black band running around it. On this band I will have copyright and production information written in the same white matte colour and font as the album title.

I stuck to my original idea, however I added the album name to the CD along with the credits and copyright information to make it look more realistic and to avoid copyright problems.

Insert Booklet

I decided to stick to having a classic digipak insert and wanted to either make a fold out poster of the band or add a lyric booklet. I stuck with a lyric booklet as it was what I had originally planned in my drawing of my digipak plans.

I chose the background image for the digipak to be the same as the front cover for the lyric booklet. I wanted the theme to be continuous throughout the digipak and wanted it to have a clear theme for the public to recognise.

Back Cover

The back cover is also just how I planned it out to look. My draft drawing was precise about placements and I carried them through. They gave the required look that i wanted. All the information, images and logos on the back cover all flow together and do not look strange or out of place which I was hoping it would look like. tHE BACK HAS ALL THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION THAT TYPICAL DIGIPAKS SHOULD HAVE - Artist name, Trackless, Production credits, Barcode Record Label, Record Label website AND Image of artist or colours/image connected to the artist/band.