Improvements Made for The Final Digipak

For my final digipak, I have made some major improvements to make it look more professional and clean. From my feedback, the grade I received for the draft of this was a D, I knew that I definitely wanted to raise it up and in order for me to do so I had to make some drastic changes to it. 



The first change I made to the digipak was the layout of it, I have completely changed it from a CD insert to an actual Digipak which holds the CD inside. I chose to have the three panel layout, three outside and three inside. As this gave me more room, it gave me more creativity to experiment and try out new images and editing techniques to get the effect I wanted. Throughout the whole Digipak, I have chosen to keep the 'City' element of the 'Country Vs. City' Music Video Concept.

For the Front cover, I haven't made any significant changes, just some minor ones. In my draft, I felt that the picture featured on the front cover looked a bit dull, there was no life to it to attract the audiences if it was to be sitting on shopping store. In the draft, it was just a Black & White picture, I liked the idea of just using Black & White pictures on the outside so I decided to keep it like that for the Final. The only change I have made for this is to colour the circle part of the London Underground Sign red, using the same red as the 'Colours' bit on the album title. When trying to do this on Photoshop, I tried achieving the look in a number of ways but the most effective method of doing it was to create a another layer on top of the picture and colour parts I wanted, then I had to go onto the layer settings and choose 'Darken'. This gave me the dark see through effect I wanted, it gave the red more depth and life to it instead of just having a block red there which would've looked quite amateur.

For the Back Cover (Middle), I have made quite a lot of changes to it. I have changed the image used for it, originally it was an side angle shot of Millennium Bridge, but when I took a look at the photos I had taken in London, I found this particular picture in the London Underground which was completely empty, the timing of it was perfect. I took it straight after the train had disappeared into the tunnel. I think that this picture really works for the back cover because in the album, I wanted to portray the idea of Isolation; no matter where you are, sometimes you can always feel lonely even if you are in the busy and crowded city. The song list has also been changed in a number of ways, the first change was the colours used. On the daft, I found that by just using black, it wasn't particularly eye catching and it just looked a bit dull. But for my final, I chose the colours red and white, these particular colours because I wanted to keep in line with the colour scheme of the front cover. I have also changed the position of the song names, originally it was on the left hand side, but I thought that it would look more effective if I moved it to the left, showing more emphasise on the empty platform. Other crucial improvements I had to make was to add the Copyright Jargon and the Barcode. The reason for this is because when I went to look at my collection of CDs, every single one of them had some sort of copyright information and a barcode on them. I think that this is really important as it establishes that the band are in fact a REAL band, they are signed with a label and are not just amateurs trying to get people to buy their albums. 

The last panel I haven't talked about yet is the red classic British telephone box, I thought that this would be a good idea to include in the Digipak because it is the one of the most iconic and distinguished objects affiliated with London and British culture. I changed the original picture to Black & White and did the same editing technique as the London Underground sign and the red lines on the empty platform, just created a new layer and painted over it. Now looking at it, I think that this was very effective, for the outside, I had shown quite a lot of modern culture of the city, with the busy people, the bright lights and the Underground. Moving away from that but still keeping in tone with the City story, I wanted to show something there that was iconic and outdated, but still have that instant acknowledgement of where it's from.

Originally for the inside of the Digipak, I wanted to use images that portrayed elements of the country, keeping in tone with the 'Country Vs. City' concept we have used for our music video. Comparing the draft and my final one, I can definitely say that I have completely changed it from the original idea, the reason for this being for the feedback I had received for it. I found that the picture and the idea I was trying to convey didn't at all flow through the whole Digipak and the inside looked kinda out of place. 

So to improve it, I thought that it would be better and more effective for the 'Branding' of the band to keep to the city images used on the outside. This way, the whole digipak would connect and illustrate the other aspect of our concept, 'Isolation'. I think I have chosen the right images to go here, when looking at them, you get a feeling of being detached and separated from reality. In the moments of taking the pictures, I wanted the audience to understand the story I was trying to portray. Even though there are people in the pictures, they are quite far away from them, they are sort of looking through somebody's else's eyes. 

On both of the end panels, I had decided to put in the name of the band using the same font used on the front cover. This in my opinion, definitely branded the digipak more, giving it more identification and distinctiveness. I wanted it to look symmetrical to the eye so I placed the title of the band on the bottom corners. I think that this looks more effective and pleasing to look at, because if I had just had the pictures by themselves, it would look boring.  

By making these changes, I can hopefully achieve the grade I want.