PLANNING - Drafts and Layouts: Digipak Front and Back Cover (Freehand)

From researching digipak's from a variety of genres, it gave me inspiration on album cover layouts and the codes and conventions used. From undertaking this important research I was able to identify the key features of an album front cover, enabling me to design some freehand drafts of initial ideas.

Initial Idea 1

This is my first initial idea for my album front cover. At  the beginning of our planning, we came up with an idea to change the title of our album from 'Only By The Night' to 'Strangers'. This was due to the idea that the meaning of the album title could link to our music video as the girl is alone in a big city and is surrounded by Strangers. On the right hand page of the draft is meant to show a sketch of cuts of different people to make up one person (as shown below).

We thought this was an original and inventive idea to have on the front of an album cover so we continued to carry out this idea. Myself and Louisa took similar photos of 22 different people who were willing to take part in our project. Here are some of the photos:

After taking the photos and trying to edit them together on Photoshop, I found it really difficult trying to line up everyones features. Myself and Louisa then helped each other out and eventually constructed this image...

We were satisfied with this image, however, after importing it onto the album front cover on InDesign, the image did not have the desired effect and impact. We printed the image off and asked our target audience what they thought about it. The answers we got was that it didn't make alot of sense and didn't fit the conventions of an album cover. After this we decided that this idea wasn't going to be successful and decided to start from the beginning.

Initial Idea 2

This initial idea is based on the existing Kings of Leon album ' Only By The Night'. However, I adapted this idea to make the 4 sectors of just the members of the band rather than an image of an owl (as shown below).  However, after sketching this idea, I realised that this would be quite difficult to line up and have the same problem like the previous idea. I also felt as though it was not original enough as it is too similar to the existing product. These are the reasons as to why I did not pursue in designing my digipak around this idea. This design is also based around the 'Strangers' idea which we were not going to continue with creating.

Initial Idea 3

This was the final idea that I sketched and I felt that this was the best option to go with. This idea has reverted back to the original title of the album called 'Only By The Night'. By sticking with this title, it gives the album a more realistic approach. One issue that had to be resolved here, was that as a group we needed to communicate with each other to make sure that we all knew that this was what the album was going to be called, so that if someone was making a poster they would be able to advertise the correct album title. A strength of this draft is that on the front cover it only has one key image that takes up most of the page, conforming to the layout of other album covers. The name of the band is clearly written at the top of the page, immediately highlighting to the audience that this is Kings of Leon's album. A possible weakness to this idea is that behind the key image of the band there is some dead space and it may look too plain when created on InDesign.

A strength to the back cover of this draft is that it has another image of the band, which is popular among digipaks. Another strength is that the track listing is clear and visible to the audience. The font size isn't too small and the position it is in is a conventional aspect. Other conventions include the barcode at the bottem of the page and the record label details on there aswell. 

Here are some images of myself sketching some initial ideas: