Digipak Research

For our digipak, it was best that we look at existing products to make sure that our held the same professionalism as the others used within our genre. So Jamie brought in some CD for us to analyse and look into and see if we could get a good idea of what to create for our own digipak. the first album we looked into was Green Day's album: American Idiot.

The front cover of the album was more artwork than live imagery of the band, presenting us with a hand holding a heart shaped grenade, reflection on the lines of the song 'She's a rebel' on the album:

'She's the symbol
of resistance
and she's holding on my
heart like a hand grenade'

With this we can see a sense of continuity throughout their piece of which we might want to use within our digipak as an idea. E.g. Take our main line "give all my secrets away" and create an image to reflect this.

With the front cover of 'American Idiot' we can see they have used a simplistic colours such as black, red and white to help present a violent out look onto the album.

The font for 'GreenDay' is a very simple block texted design with slight distortion to keep the theme of violence and rebellion. IT is the biggest text on the front cover followed by the album name 'American Idiot' which is smaller but in a different colour, red.

When looking inside the CD jewel case, we noticed that the album keeps to the same colour scheme throughout using the colours as continuity. There are no pictures of the band them self but are iconic enough to be noticed by their Band name/logo aswell as just their names which are highlighted within red writing, they are also noticed by their instrument and their part within the band which is all written beneath the names. The inside also has references towards the producers, other musicians and guest singers who helped produce the album. It also notes the placement of recording.

Behind the actual CD is a nice simple black background, and doesn't focus on anything interesting other than the CD.

When looking at the back of the CD it shows a list of songs so that the audience knows what they are buying., it also carries on a continued theme of the 'hand grenade' by having a picture of a pin on the grenade. This is done to help create a sense of coherence throughout the album and make it look together as one product. Another aspect on the back cover is the usual bar-codes, Parental Advisory' label, and advertisement for 'greenday.com' and 'repriserecords.com' which are all references to the audience so they understand more about the artist they have picked up.

The next album we decided to look into was the Kaiser Chiefs album 'Employment'. The ideas behind this album were very similar to Greenday's album, but this time with a brown theme which is again displayed throughtout the album with amny features and designs within the same place.

This colour scheme is used throughout the album mand is even similar to Green Day's album. Both back covers present the song list, barcodes and contributers to the album, as well as 'Kaiserchiefs.co.uk' shown on the back. Whereas on the font cover, the usuasl 'logo' font for Kaiser Chiefs' band name is used with the album anme written in a very different and italic type face. The font cover also shows a sticker stating 'special edition', this is common umongst albums in general so my group will take this into consideration wether or not to add this to our digipak, but overall i beleive we shall not since the sticekr is not physically not a part of the digipak. Unlike the Green Day album, the inside of the album behind where the CD would be is a patten which is continious throughout the album. The inside cover also shows the names of the songs in the album and a small change in design is shown. The back and inside covers are different to the front cover and CD panel, as they depict lighter colours.

This album presented, 'U218 Singles', is very different to the others and is focused much mroe on the band identity and has more band pictures with a black and white colour scheme used through out this design and a varied pictures of the band across three panels of the album. Although the panel behind the CD is planin black similar to the Green Day album.Many albums appear to not have any kind of pattern behind the CD, and if they do it is very simplistic.