Design for digipak 2

Now that I had edited my core - front cover photograph, I have to think about how I am going to fit it into a digipak format. Below are some of the designs I have come up with for my front cover.

Seeing as though a digipak cover is much squarer, there was a lot I had to cut out from my original picture, below:

I decided I would have to cut off the woodland on the left side of the path, and the skull side of the actress' face. It was important to show that the album is a 'journey' hence why I kept the path in - while I can still make use of the skull side of the face in other parts of the design. Having a photograph in which the actress looks directly at the camera reinforces an idea of it being a performance, and that she is looking at you - the customer.

I chose to make use of the space on the cover by using large spacing between letters, so that the title is more readable from further away (in stores, customers will be walking quickly through the isles, they might not look more than once at the covers). I chose to position the artist name halfway between where the actress' face starts - this was to make sure there wasn't too much symmetricality in the cover, so that it stood out while not looking out of place.

To follow my music video's theme further, I used two font colours - one white and one a darker grey. This follows the skull half of face idea of my production. This also uses my research on readability, all capitals with enough space in-between. The font I used was _____ and i made sure to keep it in all upper case, so to preserve consistency and boldness.

In my second attempt, I think I improved the design a lot. The changing of the album title to the bottom of the cover means that customers have space to rest their eyes and are able to more easily understand what is happening in the photograph (before, text was dashing across the middle.

I decided that my positioning of text had gotten to the point where it was perfect, but I still wanted to find ways to improve my cover. I tried to test out some of the other photograph edits to see if they would be more aesthetically pleasing or bold than my current one. I also wanted to see if there could be any improvements to the choice of font, even though I was happy with it already.

I chose to use my brighter but more neutrally saturated edit. The brighter cover with greener-greens would stand out more than my previous attempt. The harsher colours also connote a darker, more reflective album, which James Blake's music usually is. 

But again, there isn't really enough different about the album to distinguish itself for anything else or necessarily to establish James Blake's unusual genre of music. I decided to take inspiration from his actual album cover:

And so I came up with:

The cross-fade effect in the photo is great at introducing the connotations of it being a deeper and abstract album, which really makes it stand out more as the cover for a unusual genre. This will be my front cover, pending any further updates.