Inspiration for my ideasThe two biggest influences on my initial ideas for my digipak design were Razorlight’s album cover for ‘Up All Night’ (2004) and the DVD cover for Jean-Luc Godard’s film A Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1959), which caught my eye. I found the Razorlight album cover influential because of the way it uses seemingly worthless but very personal items in a collage in order to appeal to its indie target audience, as this is a sign of both independence from the mainstream and anti-commercialism (in a kind of “it’s the small things in life that matter” message). In a similar way, I can use stills from my music video as nostalgic images. The DVD case of Breathless caught my eye because of the way the title is written on vertically which, while very simple, immediately stands out. I have been working on several variations on potential design ideas, which are listed in the following slides.

I have used stills from my music video to create the collage for the background. This part of the design was influenced by the Razorlight album cover mentioned above, while the text was influenced by the Breathless DVD cover. The positive aspect of this design is that it manages to avoid being very dull, despite the simplicity, and the text is attention-grabbing. However, the black text is perhaps too difficult to read, which makes it an unsuccessful design.

Here I have made the images in the background smaller so that the text is easier to read. However, by doing this the design has perhaps become too dull and for this reason I don’t think it’s an effective design.

The images here are now far too small and I quickly dismissed this design, although the text is now much more readable.

In these designs I have put the size of the background images back to the previous size to avoid the dullness of the last design and introduced colour to make the text readable. I feel it’s slightly better than the previous one, but I’m not satisfied with it.

These are some further coloured text variations which were ultimately rejected.

In these designs I have moved away from the black and white background and opted for a sepia background instead. I feel this works well, however the white text is hard to read, especially in the high-exposure variation on the right.

Here I have kept the high-exposure background variation but changed the design of the text completely in an attempt to avoid white lettering. I think that the effect of the scrunched up paper is nice as it adds to the personal feel as can be found in the Razorlight album cover, however it rather leaves the rest of the space quite bare. Furthermore, the font is not clear or bold enough for it to stand out. I like the idea of the scrunched paper but it needs to be used in a slightly different way.

Here I have combined the previous text designs, and I am very pleased with the results. I have tried a few variations with the bold text of “The New York Fund”, and I feel that the version seen directly above is the most effective, since the white text is difficult to read and the larger-text variation seen in the bottom left corner is overly dominated by the very chunky text. However, the font of “Nobody’s Home” is not clear enough so I have tried a few variations, which are shown in the following slides.

After careful comparison between the various fonts, I feel that the following two are the most effective:

In both of these designs, the fonts for “Nobody’s Home” are clear and easy to read, making the effect of the scrunched paper very successful, whilst the text for “The New York Fund” is also attention-grabbing due to it’s bold and simple font, as well as it’s slightly unusual arrangement. I am confident that one of the above designs will be my final digipak cover, however I will need to consider both of these designs before making my final decision.