My Final Front Design.

I looked at these two designs and wanted to develop it further to make sure that i was 100% happy with my final product, this would be the most important side of my Digipak since it would be what was on view in shops and what people would take their first opinions of. I made a list of features that an album must have in order to stand out from the 1000's of other discs in shops;

• Bright/Bold Colours
• A Striking Image
• Interesting/Different Font
• Relevance to the Genre
• Memorable Name of Artist/Band/Album

Baring all these factors in mind here is my final front cover;



I think that my Album cover full fills all of the above bullet points since it has a bright background, The pink really stands our against the black background and will definitely stand out if it were in a shop. The name of both the band and the album are ones that stick in your brain and are likely to be remembered by a lot of people. Having previously discussed the font i think that it will be a big selling point since it has never been seen on an album cover before and this makes it unique and interesting. I have almost connected the bands name ' Constant Invasions' as this makes it more together and shows that its actually the bands name fully, Almost like one word rather than two separate ones.
After three attempts i am happy with my final product since it full fills the conventions of an album cover and also fills my ideals about my perfect album cover.

Front Cover.

The front cover of my album cover required the most attention and i in fact made two versions before i made the final product;

1. This idea is completely different to my final product, i used a different image for this design, one that was of Hasan without any face paint or glitter on and used editing instead, i think that it is very unclear and that it would have been a bad idea to use this image since when showing people they found it hard to actually work out what it was. I also think that there is too much pink borderline, it makes it look very amateur and also very childish, which isn't the image i wanted to portray on my cover. I also decided against having the parental advisory sticker since this gives the image of the album being quite negative and slightly cuts down the possible audience since there will be people that are put off by the possibility of expletives etc.
There is also a huge amount of the cover being taken over by the background to the font, which looks untidy and once again quite amateur so this is something i have removed in my further designs.

2. This is the second cover i made and it is very similar to the final product, i used the scrabble font and separated them all so that there wasn't a huge amount of the background colour distracting the cover like in the first attempt. By not having an image that isn't completely photoshop based means that there is a stronger image that people can see and recognise, a feature that wasn't apparent in the first draft. I also decided to use a 'Black Leather' background to make the album cover have more of a rocky edge, since before it seemed very indie. By using leather then the genre of the CD will be portrayed in a more relevant light and will also cohere with the conventions of this genre. I think that the lack of Parental advisory sticker means that the CD is friendlier and also helps to sell the album to parents and other people that may be concerned with the contents of the disc, allowing our Album to become available to a wider audience.

Scrabble Letters.

For the text on my front cover i didn't want to use a font that had been used on other album covers, especially since i wanted mine to be unique, for this i researched into many fonts online but none really fitted the image i had in my head.
In the end I decided to use Scrabble Letters, i set them up on my scanner and cut around them separately in photo shop. I think that this is effective since people will recognise the letters from the board game and it also hasn't been used on an album cover before.





In 'Faking It' I added an extra I as i was planning on turning it into an Exclaimation mark in photo shop but when actually trying this it didn't look very realistic so instead I decided to completely cut it from my writing.

Album cover

I have decided on the name Constant Invasions for my band and the album will be called Faking It, Both of these names have been chosen from Lily Allen lyrics and are selections that I feel will fit in with our genre of Pop/Rock.
I asked a friend, Hasan Beyaz to pose for pictures that I could use for my Album cover, i decided i didnt want just a portrait since when looking at other album covers there are very few that just have a plain picture, effects are frequently used and make the cover more interesting.
We decorated his face with pinky/purple face paint and a lot of glitter, this made for interesting pictures. These are my favourite 9 pictures, I am pleased with the results as they came out exactly how I imagined them.

My Questionnaire.

To help make my digipak the best it could be i have made a questionnaire to find out what people like/dislike and are/arent attracted to in an album cover. I handed out 30 copies of my questionnaire and here are my results;

Gender: The female to male ratio is very biased. There are only 9 males: 21 females which means that less then a third of my questionnaires will represent the male views on album covers. However i could use the fact that more females would prefer to listen to the band, due to the feminime lyrics and powerful lead female vocals.

Preference to digipak: Similarly to the graph above, the ratio is very uneven, this time however since its due to opinion it is not detremental to have to adapt my album cover. The 10 people that chose Jewel Case Cd's compared to Digipaks wrote many different reasons as to why they prefer this option, some claim that they preferred 'having less space with just the two sides of the cd case rather then the never ending panels on some digipaks' and oone person said that they 'just buy the cd for music and do not need or want the extras that some digipaks provide.'

Overall most people would prefer a Digipak, because its 'modern and easier to store' and 'gives you bonus features and interesting information on the artist or band' compared to the standard jewel cases.

Band Name: I think that band names cannot just be a random spur of the moment thing, but i cannot just express my own views, by asking people which they think is most important means that i can see whether it actually matters if the name of the band is meaningful and representative or just one thats catchy and memorable. The general response from my questionnaire is that 19 out of 30 agree with me which is just under 2/3, this means that the bands name has to have some kind of meaning, this doesnt have direct impact on my album cover since this kind of information is not presented on the front of a cd. However it would be better if the band name had an impact on the images that are presented on the front of my album cover.

My Band.

When listening to our song, i have always thought of the singer being part of a band rather then just a solo artist, its a usual sight that the main singer of a band is the most popular and recognisable member, which means that most people are fans of the singer rather then the band all together, and interviews and other projects are often done as a solo thing. Its also a very reoccuring thing that the lead singer is female, examples include;

Hayley Williams; Paramore, Elly Jackson; La Roux, Beth Ditto; Gossip, And Florence Welch; Florence and the Machine.

This shows that even if i chose a band then its likely that the lead female singer will be the iconic image if the band were mentioned. Another positive of having a band rather then a solo artist are that a band will enable more people to relate to the band, perhaps certain members could be personal favourites to different people, creating more fans and also making a bond between the other members, which could feel less superior to the lead singer, that usually has all the attention. This will help to make all the features of my Band, album cover and Music video become realistic and effective.

CLC visit number two.

Our second trip to the City Learning Centre gave us the oppurtunity to edit our film with a professional near by, able to help us with any problems that we have or any questions we might want to ask. This was helpful since as mentioned before we werent very confident with the new version of iMovie and the online tutorials couldnt answer all the questions we had.

When talking to the people at the CLC we were told firstly that our transitions were too slow and werent going with the beat, which was important so as not to make our music video look sloppy or unprofessional. We were quickly helped by being introduced to 'Beat Markers' which was a simple marker that you can drag onto your clips which would automatically change the time of the clip in order to make sure that it didnt miss the beat or go on to long.

We were also informed that our hopes of imatating the technique used in Blink 182's video of having three different sections to the clip, to show off the three boys, it wasnt possible due to the programme we had, something that we will have to change on our storyboard and work round, finding alternative ways to show off the three dates. Possibly a wipe across the scene, which if timed right could look just as effective.

I think that the trip has helped us, because it enables other people that are professionals to look at our video and give us constructive criticism, and to let us know things we are or arent able to achieve; another example being the fact that our video is very grainy in some scenes, we were informed that we couldnt actually use any type of programme on the computer it has to be done when actually filming, which means that we can remember this for future projects, to help us get a more proffesional result.