Font layouts

Here are some of my Font choices that I may use for my Digipak:

The title of the Artist was aimed to express her Earthy feel with an urban twist to her style to represent her. Allowing the font to possibly help people connect the font to the artist of Poppy Power. 

With the fonts i am looking for the fonts that will stand out yet represent the style of music that is going to be played in the album. 

Digipaks that relate to my genre.

Album analysis on Prezi

ANCILLARY RESEARCH: Practice Digipak Cover

Before as a class we plan and design our own digipaks, we had one lesson where we were told to create a digipak using provided images so as a class we can become familiar with Photoshop. This session allowed the class to use Photoshop and learn the basics of cropping images, using layers and generally navigating around the program to see what the software has to offer and is possible. For most people, it allowed us to brush up on a few things and ask general questions on how to do certain things.

As I already have quite enough using experience using Photoshop, I used this time to look into the more detailed and complicated editing features Photoshop has to offer. Having used Photoshop for a couple of years now, I want to see what more I can do with images which I didn't know before. After cropping and placing my images, I started browsing the software a bit more and discovered the colour adjustment tool under the Enhance tool bar. This allowed me to change the colour of the image and enhance the vibrancy. I done this just to experiment around a bit with the program, and after the making the changes, I applied it to the digipak front cover.

Looking at the more complicated editing features of Photoshop.

Below is my practice digipak cover:

As you can see, Dan has a different colour in contrast to the image behind him. I altered the colouring and made him appear much more vibrant in colour compared to the image before.

As I already have experience using Photoshop, I focused more on what I do not know than spending too much effort on this practise mock up digipak. As I like the way you can change the entire appearance of an image by altering the colours and saturation, this is what I mainly focused on in this lesson. You can also see the background image is slightly dull in comparison to Dan. I had purposely done this to bring more emphasis on the artist Dan himself than the background. This is done as it adds more focus on the artist which is what I wanted to achieve as it will better promote the artist.

Research - Additional Ancillary Products

With a few days to go until our final deadline, I have completed my digipak and advertisement! Since I now have a bit of spare time, I decided to research a few more examples of ancillary products, as there are so many possibilities that I have stumbled across.

Florence on the Underground

First of all, remember a while ago when I was hoping I would find a billboard of Florence + the Machine to talk about in this blog post? Well, a few weeks ago I came across the following poster in the London Underground. For some reason, I've always loved seeing music posters and billboards, and it's one of the many ways in which we are constantly exposed to music in some way or another. Posters such as this are also very similar to magazine adverts, which I've now had a go at producing for myself, in terms of the information that is communicated. For example, with this poster, we see an image of the artist (Florence) which is also the one that is used on the album cover, the names of the artist and album, a list of the singles that are included, plus a star rating from a magazine review. Straight away I can tell from the past research that I have done that these are all common features that are displayed in print music adverts.

The internet has become a big platform for marketing, so it is no surprise that many websites feature advertising. One website in particular, however, is a hub of music promotion. In addition to featuring an endless amount of music videos, video sharing site YouTube has partnered with Vevo and now their advertising is inescapable. Below, you can find a slideshow of a couple of ways in which YouTube has been advertising Vevo.

Various Vevo adverts featured on YouTube

Following this, I decided to create my own YouTube/Vevo advert advertising Poppy Power's music video, which you can see, placed on the YouTube page of a Florence + the Machine song, below.

Click to enlarge

Finally, I decided to create an interactive banner ad that would be displayed on music sites. What I like about this is that they sometimes have the artist's latest music video embedded in the banner, which is great promotion as the site's visitor doesn't have to click away in order to watch it. I say this because it is the way in which I discovered Clare Maguire (who I have talked about before) and her song Ain't Nobody whilst browsing music site Popjustice (I have no idea why I remember this but there you go). Below you can see my outcome, which I produced using the site BannerSnack.

Ancillary Work - Progress

I am currently in the process of creating my Digipak and my advertisement. Since the last time I worked on it I have changed lots as I felt some of the images didn't look so good and received helpful feedback on them. None the less I have removed some work and this is the stage my work is currently at:

Here is what my Digipak cover looks like with the image on the back.

I have changed the font I used for the Name and Title of the album. I used a font called 'Decibel' and the font 'Broken Wing' for the name of the album. I feel that this sans serif font show the artist is quite contemporary and can reach out to young adults who enjoy alternative music. The font is also quite edgy as it looks informal and shaky, suggesting the artists style of music.

Here is my Digipak cover without an image on the back,

This is the cover I will most likely be going with, as I think on the other case the picture is a little random and doesn't fit in. However I might try to zoom into her face and crop the image and then place it on the back. But for the moment this is how it will stay until I finish it off completely. I have been having difficulty with this task, in terms of finding a decent picture which will match the front one as I don't want to change it, but hopefully I will find one, if not I will design it without.

Here is the inside of my Digipak, which I changed again. The image I initially wanted to use wasn't a good enough quality to enlarge therefore I have used this one and used the blur tool on Photoshop to fade it into blackness. This will work because on the panel on the right hand side, the CD will be placed there, therefore the image would be covered. This way you can see the image clearly and it works to my benefit.

This is how my advertisement looks at the moment. I have used the same image, fonts and colours on my Digipak to keep them associated at all times. I added a quote from a music magazine to promote the artist further as this magazine is well known. I have placed the title and name in the biggest letters at the top of the page, followed by the release date written in clear, big writing. This makes the two most important texts on the advert stand out and catch the given audiences' attention.