Fan Profile

Our typical fan will probably be a teenager however the style of song could potentially attract older audiences

Our typical fan is named Sarah Green. She downloads her music off iTunes regularly, at least once a week. She is aged 16 and attends college where she has made a lot of new friends. She reads magazines such as 'The Clash' and is interested in the indie and alternative genre supporting artists such as Passenger, Tom Odell and Mumford and Sons. She enjoys going to concerts and especially festivals, she uses lots of social networking sites such as, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. On these social networking sites she likes to share her favourite music and she likes to share songs she loves with her close group of friends. 

Advert Idea

This is the photo we are basing our idea on. This artist is named 'Sixto Rodriguez' and I like how well he stands out in the photo. We want to base our advert on this and use the same costume idea so that our star is wearing all black clothing and we possibly will make the photo very high contrast like this. However we want to make something on our artist stand out and make him seem different. We are going to have our artist wear some scruffy looking trainers which will stand out from the rest of his clothing. The rest of his costume will be a black shirt and black trousers with a loose tie to make him look casual. We also plan to put a photo of his scruffy trainers in our digipak.

Photo ideas for our digipak and the shoes our star will be wearing in the advert

Digipak Research

What to include

Back Cover

• Barcode
• Logo
• Name/logo of record label
• Website link to artist profile
• Track list
• Background image that moulds with track list
• Piracy/Copy warning (WARNING: All Rights Reserved)
• The year of album

Front Cover

• Photo of artist to portray the star image
• Title of Album
• Name of Artist

Inside our Digipak

• Space for where the CD will go
• Logo under where the CD will go
• Panoramic picture that will stretch over all three fold inside the digipak that fits in with the rest of the digipak

Last space in the digipak

• A photo that will relate to our advert 
• Lyrics to our song beside the photo

Album covers that inspired our idea

I chose to look at these artists as I think that they are of a similar genre of our artist/song.

I think these two album covers relate to our idea the most as the pictures are very similar. The picture we have chosen for our album cover is a picture of our star with part of his face cropped so that we are completely focused on him. The picture of our star is also on the left which is the same as these covers. We also are having a picture in the background which relates to the 'high' album cover.

These two albums relate to our advert as well as our album cover. I think they relate to our album as they portray a good star image but they also relate to our advert idea due to the long roads in the background as album is going to be called 'Road To Nowhere'.

This back cover is a little bit similar to our idea. We plan to have our star sitting on a bench near the waterfront in ipswich overlooking the boats which will be in the background and we plan to have it in the centre of our back cover, similar to this one.
We will take the picture from behind and put the song titles of the track list on his back or around him such as this album back cover.
This also shows the conventions of a back cover with the logo of the record company and the barcode and the small text at the bottom.

Experimenting with Fonts

Our Chosen Font
All of our fonts were chosen and download of the website 'www.dafont.com'.

We have chosen this font because we think that it fits in well with the album cover. It is nice and simple but I think that it is very effective too. It stands out well against the light background and I wanted the audience to be attracted to the name of the album and our star. I wanted to position the title in the middle where it is easiest to see it and the name of our artist at the bottom where it doesn't stand out as much. I think that having the name of the artist not stand out as much is quite a good idea due the fact that our typical fans will know who the star is as he is on the front cover of the digipak. The font we have chosen is called 'Nixie One'.

This font is called 'Sketchy Times'. I liked this font however I don't think that it is bold enough and I wanted the font to stand out so that it could be read well from a distance and I wanted it to be eye catching.

This font is called 'Amplify'. I think this font stands out effectively however I don't think that it fits in with the album cover very well. I also don't like that it is in italics. I think that the lower case letters look good but the words 'Jeffrey James' in upper case letters is quite hard to read and looks a little too fancy.

This font is called 'Simply Square'. I like this font however I think that is a little bit too bold and I didn't like the fact that you could only have upper case letters.

This font is called 'Road Movie'. I didn't like this font very much because I think it is a little too bold, it also doesn't fit in with the cover very well. I also again, didn't like the fact that you could only have upper case letters. I think that the words and letters are too spaced out as well.

This font is called 'Riesling'. I didn't like this font because it is really small and isn't very bold at all. I also don't like the font in capitals as all the letters are really squashed together.

Our logo

This is the logo I have created for our digipak. I duplicated the image in photoshop and flipped it. I then moved the images to where I wanted and used a layer mask to remove the parts of the images that overlapped too much. I plan to overlay our logo on the inside of our digipak under where the disk will be so it is seen when the disc is taken out. I like the lighting used on this image and I was going to make the logo black and just have the outline however I didn't want to have rough edges and I think it looks a bit plain and boring with the whole of the image black. It also has a lot more detail and I think it is more effective without the whole image being black. This photo will also be easy to edit as the whole of the background is white.

Creating the album cover (The Front of our Digipak) - Draft

Photos I Was Considering
                                                        
This is the photo that we chose for our album cover. I liked this photo but I wasn't too sure about the lighting as I thought it was too soft and the lighting was too powerful. I thought it would be more interesting with shadows on the face. 
I created this image by using a white back drop so that he stood out more and using two soft box lights. Although I wasn't too sure about the photo however we decided that it had more personality and we liked the fact his eye stood out really well.



I preferred this photo due to the amount of shadow on his face. I created the shadows by turning one of the soft boxes off so that it only flashed on one side of his face. I like how his eyes look as he is looking straight into the camera. However there is a lot of shadow on the backdrop and this photo doesn't have as much character as the other one.

Editing my chosen photo

This is the final image I have produced for the front cover of my digipak, however it is just a draft as the photo of the road I have used is off the internet. I will have to go and shoot my own picture of a road and simply edit it into the photo but I wanted to get an idea of how it would look and I think it has turned out quite effectively.

How I Created The Image

 First of all I opened my chosen image in photoshop.
I then cropped the left side of the image as some of his eye was revealed and I wanted the audience's focus to be on only one of his eyes as I think it stands out a lot more. 

To give the picture more character and make it look more interesting I duplicated the layer and made the top layer black and white. I then added the multiply effect the top layer. This made the picture look more in depth and created some shadows on his face. However applying this effect made his eye a lot darker and again, didn't make it stand out as much as I wanted it to, so I created a layer mask and used the brush tool to remove the black and white effect from his eye to make it brighter and more blue, again to attract the audience to his eye.
                                                                                                    
 


After I was happy with the image of Connor I then decided to start working on the background. The name of our album is 'Road To Nowhere'. This is why I wanted to include a road in the background so that it definitely related to the album name. I got the picture of the road off the internet and have just used it so that I can get an idea of what the album cover would look like.  I created a layer mask on the image of the road and used the brush tool to remove the image of the road from his face so that  there are no distractions from his face.
                                                                                                      


To finish the image I then applied a 'Soft Light' effect on the image of the road so that it didn't stand out too much and look too vibrant and bold. I like the fact that the road is only faint in the background and it will not distract from the album title.

Logo Idea for our Digipak

This is the basic idea for our logo so far. We plan to take a side profile picture of our star and mirror them. I created this rough image for our logo just to get an idea of what it will look like and to see if it works effectively. I created this image in photoshop by duplicating the image of our star and flipping the image. I used to the fill tool to make the whole area black and applied the background of the sunset. I also reduced to opacity of our black logo to make it more effective and to make sure it doesn't stand out too much and wasn't overpowering. This also helps for it to fit in with the background.