Digipak Final Draft

Here is the final draft of my digipak:

However, if the digipak was to be printed to be functional, it would need to be presented like this:

What has changed since the draft?

After reviewing the draft myself, and receiving feedback, I altered it and created the final draft that can be seen above. 

When looking at the draft of my digipak, I thought that the images on the outside were not very defined, and I thought they looked quite washed out. To improve this, I increased the contrast across the whole digipak, which make the darker colours more defined, and gave the digipak a better look overall. Increasing the contrast, also made the colour in the Winter Wonderland images pop, and made them a lot more eye-catching. 

When comparing the digipak I had created to the existing, official digipak for this album, I saw that they had included a parental advisory label. This is an important convention of digipaks, and one that I had overlooked when planning and creating my draft. Therefore, I decided to include one in the bottom right-hand corner of the front cover of my final draft.

When I received feedback on the the first draft of my digipak, my classmates pointed out two things that I had not included on my first draft. The first thing that was brought to my attention, was that I had not included any sort of social media names/website links on the digipak anywhere. I decided that I would include this on the back cover, as this was where most of the detail was included. I thought that, as this was where people would expect most text, this would mean that the link would be most likely to be read. I decided to include the URL of a website on the back cover, rather than any social media links, as people would be able to access the social media of the band via the website. The other convention that I had not included in my first draft were the icons/logos of the record label. To find out this information, I reviewed the official digipak of the album, and then searched for the logos online so that I could include them.

On the spine of the digipak, I had included the the artist name and the album name. However, on review, I did not like the way I had presented this. Upon looking at already existing digipaks, I found that though they included the names of the album and artist, they did not include 'by' in between them. I chose to remove this, however, I needed to find a way to differentiate the album name and the artist name. I did not want to alter the font/typography used that is a common feature on digipaks, so I chose to use the technique I had used on the cover to do the same thing. I used a thin straight black line to separate them, which maintained the typography features throughout the cover, which made it a lot more sleek.

Feedback that I received from my teacher outlined how the relationship between Josh and Hannah's characters is not particularly obvious from the image that I have included. I agreed with what was said when I reviewed my piece, though I wanted to keep the image that I had initially included, so I decided I would use layering to add another image. To make the relationship more clear, I used the magic wand tool to cut out Josh and Hannah's arms and hands from the close up shot of them holding hands, as I thought this made the relationship obvious to anyone who was viewing the digipak. I positioned the layer in the 'empty' space of the image, and altered the opacity of the layer. This made sure that it did not take the focus of the piece entirely off the original image, and as it blended into the image quite well, it simply just enhanced the narrative. I thought the positioning and opacity of the layer I added, made this panel of the digipak very visually impressive, particularly because the colours of the layer I added, blended with those in the original image.

I kept both the left-hand and right-hand panels of the inside of the digipak the same as on the draft, as I thought these images were effective, which was confirmed to me with the feedback I received. I also kept the centre panel the same apart from one element. My teacher pointed out that I had not included any copyright information on the CD itself. Upon reviewing existing digipaks, I found that this is a common convention, and so I made sure to include it in my final draft. In order to make the copyright information fit well on the CD, I made sure to transform the text, so that it curved around in the shape of the CD.