Digi-pack Back pane

This lesson I have been working on my back pane.  As part of our overall 4 pane digipack. I first needed an image which we did a photo shoot with an SLR camera. I have done it step by step in order to give an overvieew of the process.

Above is the original image that was used in photoshop. I decided on this Image because one convention of  indie Album covers is to have images of people, back covers more specifically have have images in reverse so they will often feature the backs of peoples heads and in this case i wanted to continue with this. One problem with leaving the image as it is, is that the image size is too large in dimension size. The dimensions of this image are 4928 x 3264 pixels compared with the image size we decided on which was 600 x 537 pixels. So the image itself would have to be made smaller in order to make it fit.

Above is the Edited image. Firstly i adjusted it to the correct dimension in order to fit our digipack. This image uses the correct decided dimensions which were 600 x 537 .Then I decided that in order to create the desired effect I needed to black and white the image, similar to what was done to the Album Whatever People Say I Am, Thats What Im Not. This has created the image that I wanted. This was the basis for the entire back pane and now i could begin to Add the details that had to be put onto i tin order for the piece to look authentic.

This image is the same image as the ones above only now it has been given company information in the form of a Logo. The logo in the shot is firstly not a real company it is a company that has been invented for the purposes of this project only and was not intended to cop any previous company name. To the left of this text is an enlarged version of the Logo. Inspiration was drawn from the Logo for the clothes logo GUP and the three letter combination was drawn from real life record labels Like NME. The Barcode is also a crucial part of the design because we are selling this as if it were a real product so it would need to have this feature, because every other physical digi-pack would have one. For the most pare the Barcode is on the back so i decided to stay with the convention.

The next thing that needed to be added was the track listings. In order to accomplish this with great accuraccy Firstly somewhere we needed to put our song their and secondly, because it was an album we needed to put other tracks on their as well. This left me with a choice, Invent other song titles or use already existing songs from the artist of our choice. I decided with the latter because it would have been difficult to invent new song titles in the stile of the Arctic Monkeys because there is no common theme to draw upon and each song is different in subject to another. In order to pick the songs i found a list containing all their songs. The only thing that i wanted to avoid was putting songs together that were from existing Albums because this wouldn't have been quite a unique product if i did. There are a few songs that are from the same album but they are not an exact replica.

Lastly I made the decision to change the font of the Back pan from PortagoITC TT to American Typewriter. I decided to do this because I felt that it was a more appropriate font for our target audience, the original font was too big and bold for it to be believable for an Indie band. This was my decision to do this but I feel that it has payed off.

This Lesson...

This Lesson I was able to Design and Finish my Digi-pack back pane. Since we have allocated the digipack panes equally between two i am half way to doing my share of the digipack. After the front pane is done i will stop work on the digipack and allow Jack to do his half of the work. Only fair. Their is an issue with the screen grabs but hopefully i will have these done by the end of the week.

Digi-pack Back pane research

The back pane of our Digi-pack will be created and researched by me. In regards to the conventions of pretty much every album from every genre, the back pane will have a direct connection to the Front pane. This can be either an extension of the original image, a reverse shot of an image or another image that is connected to the image. For the more specific genre of Indie they do pretty much agree and use these conventions in their own albums. Another key factor that has to be adressed is that the back pane has lots more information about the album and band than the front. Common conventions include Track listings, Copyright information, company logos and additional legal information. Some examples below from Arctic Monkeys.

Whatever People say I am, Thats What Im Not















Favorite Worst Nightmare

Both these are from Arctic Monkeys albums and they are relevent to the front pane (see front pane research) because they are almost extensions of them.

Evidence of copyright

Below is the letter that was typed to be deliverd to the distributing company for the Arctic Monkeys. We are not expecting a reply but we felt it was required that we actually have the evidence to avoid copyright laws.

Digi-pack Front Pane research

The front pane of our Digi-pack will be made by me. I feel that our front pane should be a photograph. I feel this because we need to stick to the conventions of the band and the genre in general. Photographs are present in many indie rock title because they are a form of art and it can take very creative aspects in order to do them. Below are some examples.

Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I' m Not

Favorite Worst Nightmare 

Humbug


















There is a recurring theme in these and that is that each album is in fact a photograph. They may be edited but they are still photos. Another thing that i can comment on is the font use. There is no universal font style of convention so it gives us a broader and more diverse choice of font. Again we can attempt to be more creative with it.

The dimensions of the front cover will be 600 x 537 pixels as recommended by various online sources. I agree with this because it is still the conventional shape of a digipack.

Rough Cut

Digipack plan

For our Album cover/Digipack we have planned to make in in accordance with the conventions of Indie. We Have multiple ideas about what our digipack could be like. We will either use a more artistic approach to the design with some kind of drawing like such albums as Muse.

Another approach is the photography approach to it.

The Layout:

There are two possible layouts that can be used for the actual production but these two designs only really affect the number of panes which will be either 4 or 6.

Here is an example of a 4 pane Digipack:

And Here is a good example of a 6 pane Digipack:

For the one we would actually use it is still open for debate but to give ourselves more breathing space for more ideas we may do the 6 panel edition for our one because it gives us a good reason to put extra creative things into our digipack where a 4 panel one may hinder us and force us to choose.

The Content:

It is important however to stick to the conventions of previous digipacks because they include everything needed to make it official which is the look we are looking for. A Traditional Digipack will usually include Track Listings, CD casing, Information about the Artist /Band, Images related to that particular album. For our Digipack we will have to be careful about what we put into it because we are using an existing Artists name so we will need to abide by their conventions when it comes to Track listings and the style of the pack itself. Below is an example from the Bands Second album Favourite Worst Nightmare:

This is something that is fairly feasible to do because it is essentially a series of photos which is something that can be replicated. Of course the images themselves will not be the same but the whole Idea of using Photographs is one of the things that i mentioned that we could do.