DIGIPAK CONVENTIONS

FRONT COVER

The front cover of an album is used to promote and artist to an audience, freely expressing their style and genre which will encourage and audience to pick up to album. I have featured both the name of the album and artist on the front cover of my digipak, something which is conventional as it allows the audience to know who the artist is and what album they are buying. This was a particularly important with my artist as this would be his debut album meaning people may not know who he is and not featuring his name would have meant the audience wouldn’t know who he is. My front cover also features an image of the artist, something that again is important for the reasons stated above. Another convention I followed was to have a consistent font throughout the text on my front cover. This creates a cohesion on the piece which is important to make the piece appealing to an audience.

BACK COVER

On a digipak, the back cover is where all the important information is held such as song lists, the artists record company and the barcode. For this reason it was important for me to stick to the conventions featured on back cover. Featuring the track list and album name on the back cover are both conventional and I have displayed them conventionally, going vertically down in the order they appear on the album as well as having the track number at the side. I have also placed the barcode and record labels logo on the back cover, something which is important for the back cover. I have also included the information on the executive producers on the album as well as all the copyright information that is important for the back of the album. I have also kept the font consistent throughout the back cover with all the song information being in one font and the track numbers/bonus disc being in a different font in order to distinct them from the track list. The information at the bottom is also in a different font in order to make it look more official which is conventional of back covers. Finally the album name is in the same font as the front cover and also separates itself from the rest of the text due to being yellow.

SPINE

The spine on a digipak is important as in many music shops this is what would be displayed to the audience meaning this is how they’d get their first impressions of the album. I have included the artist and album name on the spine which is conventional as it tells the audience which album they are looking at which may cause them to look at the album. They text is easy to read as it needs to be so that the audience can quickly read it as he is flicking through albums. Also featured on the spine is the record labels logo and a serial number which I noticed appear on many albums, something I didn’t know and found out in my research. I have also used the same font featured on my front and back cover which is conventional as it helps keep the album cohesive. I have also positioned the information on the spine conventionally as it makes it easier for the audience to know where to look for the information they want to know.

INSIDE COVERS

With the inside covers there wasn’t any specific conventions I needed to follow and for this reason I was able to play around with the design as much as I wanted to. However, there is still a couple of conventions that I followed on my inside covers with the main one being them relating to the rest of my product. My inside cover features pictures of both my artist and locations I have featured in my music video. The first cover features an image of the location where my artist preforms the song and the second cover features an image of my artist walking down the same street I used in my music video. It is conventional of inside covers to feature the artist and I chose to feature mine on one of my images. However, you cannot see the face of my artist which is unconventional. I decided to break this convention as I felt it worked well with the theme of my album. I also found that multiple inside covers features lyrics from songs featured on the album. I liked this idea and decided to incorporate it into my product.

BEHIND DISCS

For my covers that would go behind the disc I wanted to do something that was rather unique and came up with the idea to have blank background with lyrics from the songs featured on it and I believe this idea works well with the theme of my album. Due to this these covers are unconventional with what you could normally find. Usually the back cover would feature a pattern or an image of the artist with no text on it. I decided against this for the reasons I have stated above. I believe doing this has added a unique spin to my covers which will make it appeal to my audience and also allow them to bond with the artist as his lyrics are featured throughout the digipak.