Amy Winehouse's billboard

Even during Xmas break I can't get away with media work:D I saw this advert promoting Amy Winehouse's album.

this is the billboard advert:

this is the new album called Lioness: Hidden Treasures

As you can see, there's not much of a difference between the advert and the actual CD. I think that works really well, I think it makes it simple, but appealing. 

SIMILARITIES: The picture is the same, in the exactly the same place in both. There's a white background, the font is the same and is even placed in the same position- left center. 

So the main difference really, is the format. album- a CD size, a billboard-... well, much bigger size and a rectangular, portrait form. There are two logos on the bottom, probably the record label. There isn't anything else on it, unless it's not seen (the billboard was quite high up). Maybe it if was in a magazine, it would contain more information e.g. the realise date or a website. But because it's a billboard, many people just have a quick look at it and automatically think 'oh, Amy Winehouse's new album'. 

This is what I want my digipack to be- simple, but appealing. Without extra words, logos, symbols. Also, this CD was realised after Amy Winehouse's death, so the lack of words and  graphic may be a way of a tribute to her. 

Album name change

We have officially decided to change our name album from "BRAINWASH" to "DISCO NEVER DIES", and also choose the font, which is "Disco inferno"

You can see all of that on recording girls did while I was ill :( thanks! :*

Rule of thirds

"The rule states that an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections."




That means most important elements must stand out and should be placed on the lines, or where they meet. The reason for that is much greater attraction to those points.

Planning Ancillary products - Mock up of digipak/Pitch

Draft 1

Draft 2 - Font changes to Disco Inferno and album name changes from Brainwash to Disco Never Dies.

Mock Up with colour - Red, Blue, Yellow

Pitch: We showed our designs to our teacher (Dan) and he said that our initial ideas were great. He especially liked the font for our front cover and the overall concept. The most important part is making sure that all of our digipaks contain some aspects such as graphic design, colours and track list, which we plan to do so we can go ahead and create our final digipak designs using photoshop.

Planning Ancillary products - Font, colours and design

First font ideas:

We tried out several fonts including Uranium, Master Plan, Birth of a Hero and Digital. We wanted something clear with a modern design to reflect the electropop genre.

Final font:

We decided on the font 'Disco inferno'. The name even suits the music, and the font is similar to 8 bit but has a cool shadow effect. This was made by a website called Dafont.com.

The title of this font inspired our album name, which is called 'Disco Never Dies'. Which is really optimistic, and promotes our artist's music in a good way. We were going to call it 'Brainwash' which entails the negative side of the music world where our artist is making people realise that some music is brainwashing the nation and youths. It was also going to describe how youths are being brainwashed by certain things in the world. The artist was going to make people aware of this, whilst enjoying his music to spread an optimistic view rather than a negative one.

First colour ideas: 

Black

Red

White

We were going to use a black and effect with a subtle use of red, but decided we wanted a bit more colour. 

Final colour ideas:

We chose blue and red as they are colours on the hoody we have for Robert's costume. It also has a patriotic feel, with subtle (optional) use of black/white for writing/info. Yellow was vibrant enough to spread a colourful message. Overall it has a primary colour feel, but we want to give it a modern twist. We are only going to use a maximum of 3/4 colours as too many would spoil the theme and would not look professional. 

First graphic ideas:

A wave effect and a circular design.

Final graphic idea:

We want to add Vinyls in our design as it relates to the DJ/Disco/Electropop theme, and is the image we want to produce our artist as. (DJ) It also includes a circular theme with subtle use of lines which can link to the line/shadow effect. This allows us to fill in space with circles and lines.

Colourful shadow effect.

Shadow effect condensed into repeated image, and can be condensed further to create lines.

Line effect - Layering. I like the dots which can represent flashing lights, and the use of a few colours throughout. She is combining modern with classic as there is a conflict in her costume (hat) which links to her name, then the line effect and the second font. It is best to use no more than two fonts.

Planning Ancillary products - Fonts, colours, layout and design ideas / Do's and Don'ts of design work

Planning Ancillary products - Fonts, colours, layout and design ideas on Prezi

Do's and Don'ts of designing digipaks:

Some new ideas

While I am still away. girls looked up and found some new graphics we could use. Those are just some splashes that could be made in graphic department. They could not be directly connected with the idea of vinyl and electropop, however this could be a good way for recognition in future albums.

We have also agreed on colours: those will be Yellow, Blue and Red, in addition of black. Of course, everyone can use different tone.

Idea for mock up

This is my mock up I have done for the front cover of my CD.
My first idea of a digipak was a bit different from the final version. As you can see the oryginal album name was 'Brainwash', that is why I decided to multiplay the same image to make it more suitable to the alnum style. However, we did not stop looking for any other ideas. We felt that that it is alright, but we can invent something much better and catchy. And we found new font as well as new album name. Because our artist is a DJ, we finally decided that a new title ' Disco Never Dies' is just perfect ! It's not only suits the artist style , but what is more important his style and genre of music.

First idea

Final Idea

Final idea with colours

photoshop colouring in technique

I wanted to know how to change colour of an object in photoshop, make it colourful and I found a good tutorial explaining it, here it is:

This is what I've done for a practise. I'm a genius :D 
stage 1: the orginal smoke

 stage 2: rainbow effect

 stage 3: overlaying the layer

 stage 4 (optional): duplicating the layer

idea mock up

This is my idea's mock up with annotations. It helped me because it really made me think about the ideas for my front cover. While taking time sticking bits to paper, I had time to think carefully about there everything would go. We will use another photo of Robert, but for now we used the old one we've taken just to see how it will fit. 

Album name-new change idea

Interesting CD covers

I think we could agree that background is just fantastic, and photo  well placed.

We like the shadow/effect because it is colourful and can obtain all three main colours.

We like the different colours of the lights and the sparks shooting out to reveal a sparlking effect.

We like the use of lights to spell out the title.

new ideas

we found a good examples of graphic we will use, the splash effect. it can be done by paint or ink. there are alo circular splashes, again linking to the idea of vinyl, and DJ so we decided to use some of it. Not too much so it doesnt look OTT. 

these are two new graphic we might use.

We also agreed on the colours we'll be using: Red, yellow and blue (when producing, each one of us may use different tone of these colurs, this is just a simplest tone:

CD covers around the genre - electropop

I was doing research on the CD covers from the same/similar genre. Here are some examples I found successful:


DJ Kaskade- Love Mysterious 



Colours: Black, purple, white.
Font: serif for the name, handwritten for the CD name.


I like the use of artist's photo with the mixture of colors, it looks simple but effective.  However it seems to me that there's something missing, the bottom of the CD looks like flowers, and I have no clue what's the link. 






DJ Kaskade- Strobelite Seduction



This album seems to be better than the other one, I like the stroking lights going across the CD and I think it links to the genre. The serif font is very successful, used in both- artist name and album name.I also like the use of colour (white, purple, yellow, black) and artist's image. 
BUT again, there seems to be grass or whatever in front of the artist. I have no clue why that is, but to me looks like it's out of blue. 










DJ Kaskade- Fire & Ice 

This is the best one out of all the other examples, I really like the use of font, no fill colour inside, but the writing seems to be lighted and that's what I will bare in mind when doing my own, the writing looks 'lighted' and therefore links to the electro-pop music genre. 














LMFAO- Sorry for Party Rocking 


The two dominant colours are purple and black. I also like both fonts; one used for 'LMFAO', which has graphic of the artists on top. This makes it look like their own font style, or a 'logo'. The album name is written on the girl's body as a tattoo. I like the fact that the genre and target audience is clear, just by looking at the cover and this is what a successful CD should do. We'd expect this music to be played in parties and clubs. Even the artist's face expression says that it's a party tune songs. 




LMFAO- Party Rocking 

Again here, I like the use of font which is consistent in all of the band's albums. I like the use of colours;  green and red. I especially like 'the lights' behind the artists. I think that the font colour is too bright and annoying. 

font possibilities

On today's lesson, we started to create a mock up of digipak. We get to use to work in the group so we started to think about what should or should not go into the digipak. After a while, each of us started to inventing something individual. However, we have to come up with an name of the album. Moreover along with the name we have to think about the font.
We found 3 possible font, but we are still deciding which one will work the best.
Here are the possibilities:

While looking for these font, I also found fonts which could work as a graphic for our digipak. It is just a random idea, but it could help us as staring point.

So our name of the album is Brainwash.

We decided to go with this name because it is unconventional. It already rise many issues. We want to appeal to the 16-25 years old target audience and I am actually buying this name as I fit into this criteria.

This name would be controversial, because we dont know if the new, coming artist want to 'brainwash' us with the music he is making or maybe the opposite. In the mainstream word, full of stuff and music he creates something with stand out from the rest.