ANCILLARY PRODUCTION: Failed Digipak attempt

After conducting all of my digipak planning including drawings and identifying what images I wanted to use, I began making a quick first initial design on Photoshop. This design had come from my drawings which I had created and was right at the beginning of production.

My first initial attempt of creating my digipak front cover. While creating this work, I started to dislike how it was turning out overall and decided to abandon the work and start again. Although this was initially a draft, I could not envisage of how it will eventually turn out and what I could add to it to further improve it.

However, while quickly creating the photoshop design, I had realised a few things about the work which I was not particularly happy about. Firstly, after placing the image where I had wanted, I began to feel as if this image was not suited to what I wanted to create. This is because the photo had a plain black ground. After editing this image a bit, I felt as if the plain black background was too plain and dull as a finished product. After doing research on a few other digipaks/CD covers, I had noticed that most famous digipaks contain a well angled photograph as the main front cover with text such as the album and artist name on top. Usually, not much editing is needed if the image used is suitable or looks good enough to be the main image on the front cover of the digipak. For example, take Eminem's album cover Recovery into account. All the front cover consists of is one image of the artist with the album name added to it.

 

Although this album cover does not relate to mine in terms of genre and does not contain the artists name, I liked the simplicity of the cover and showed me how well one image works. This is what in turn made me refer back to my work which is when I decided that creating something which has a plain black ground would be too complicated to edit to make it look appealing to look at.

Another example of how well a single image can be used as the front cover of an album. 

Another reason as to why I had ditched the idea was that what I had drew on my design, I did not know how to do on Photoshop. In my design, it contained the same image used in this failed attempt, however, it also had a few artistic lines appearing from behind Poppy (the artist) stretching out across the cover getting wider and fading into the background. After a couple attempts in a previous practice session I did myself, I was unable to achieve the result I wanted.

A drawing of the front cover of my digipak. 

My drawing compared to the first attempt of me trying to recreate my design on Photoshop. I did not know how to actually create the lines appearing from behind Poppy on Photoshop and therefore did not know what else I can do.

You can see in the drawing the line effect I wanted to do. After a few attempts on Photoshop, I could not manage to recreate my design and found it difficult to evenly space out each line and not make it look disproportioned. Due to me not being able to recreate my design, this left me with a plain black background which is the first point I mentioned. I could not think of what else I could do with the failed result and had therefore decided it was best for me to abandon the this initial design and start again. This meant I had to start from scratch and think of a completely different design.