Digipack: CD Cover design and drawings

Second Shoot

We weren't happy with the photos produced from the first photo-shoot due to the backdrop; the dead trees and rubbish bins took away from the pure look we were aiming for.

To counteract this, we shot in the grounds of Hall Place (a setting we’d previously used in our video).

The grounds are a lot greener, eliminating the backdrop issue.

We attempted to get images of all the shots we were aiming to use in the digipack; the image on the front, inside photo and back image. We also experimented with shots for the poster.

Examples of pictures for the front cover:

As previously established, we will be using close up shots on the front cover of the digipack.

When deciding upon the look of our CD cover, we had to consider a few things; the genre of music, the look of the model/ artist (to correspond to the music genre and ambiance of the song) and research into similar CD covers to guide us in the construction of our own.

From our previous research we found a number of CD covers; as a general trend, the cover contains a close up of the artist’s face, with the artist’s name (usually featured in large font along the top) and single/ album cover featured in smaller font.

As a group we looked at these for inspiration, finding one in particular which we thought linked well to the look we were trying to achieve. We felt this cover (shown below) linked well to the ‘Gaia earth goddess’ ambiance we were trying to depict throughout the construction of our work. The artist Dido is portrayed in a very pure, feminine and elegant way, styled in light, silky fabrics, light makeup expressing her purity and hair soft hair moving in the breeze.

We based our first shoot on this idea, styling our model in a very similar way (the details of this clothing can be found in an earlier blog post).

In our second shoot we changed the location to one with more greenery to enhance the ‘earthy’ look of our cover, and this resulted in giving us the image we would be using on our cover.

(above section done by me)

After deciding to use this picture as our front cover photo:

In order to gain the best possible front cover, we designed multiple pictures which we could use as the final product layout:

This design features the title of the album being written down the side of the CD and the artists name being written along the bottom of to balance out the writing. The picture has been cropped so that it will primarily be on the right hand side of the cover

After looking at our research, particularly focusing on the artist of our song, Birdy, we designed a cover which just features the artists name as the title of the album as well. This would enable the model's face to take up more of the cover and would not cover her face as much. Like the first design, the picture has been cropped so that the model's face is more on the right hand side.

There is also the option of having the album title in a semi-circle above the model's head and the artists name is down the bottom of the cover. The model is more centered for this cover as this fits more with the placing of the font.

This design is a close-up of the model's face which is more on the left-hand side. The album title is featured above the model's head and the artists name being down in the right hand corner to balance out the design.

This is a simplistic design, typical of most of our research, which would fit well with the simplistic idea we are going for with our model. The model is centered here, with the artists name being placed above the model's head whilst the album title is placed at the bottom of the cover.  

(second section done by Katie)