Digipak First Draft

By Myself and James

Overall, our first draft consists of a black, white and grey house style throughout which is basic but what we believed to be quite effective. Through our research of other Paolo Nutini albums, we were made aware that his most recent album 'Caustic Love' followed a similar colour scheme. For this reason we chose to try to implement this into our own design. However, the album 'These Streets' is a more joyful and cheerful album and the actual album cover for this consists of bright, vibrant colours as shown in the image of the front cover on the right. Furthermore, our song choice for our music video itself 'Last Request' is also cheerful and our first draft of digipak doesn't successfully portray this to the audience. The dark, cold nature of our first draft detracts from the bright, cheerful nature of our music video and so we therefore believe that a new idea must be arranged. The base of our digipak is there however we are aware that there ought to be more of a variety of colours and perhaps some different images of the band members in order to convey the over riding message behind the album.

This is our first draft of our digipak. The 5 components are shown in the slideshow below. Click for larger image.

After completing our first draft, we gained feedback from other members of our class as well as our teacher and here were their likes and dislikes:

Likes:

The layout across the whole digipak looked professional adding to the authenticity of the album so the main layout for the digipak should remain the same.
Consistency in house style was clearly portrayed which should be implemented in the final draft.
The colour scheme used was carried across all sections linking to the consistency of house style.
The main image was powerful and the special effect used enhanced the image.
Having just lead singer on the cover was a good choice as it combines with the implementation that its a solo artists album.

Dislikes:

The colour scheme of black, grey and white was dull and wouldn't cross promote with the video due to the video being brighter in colour so there needs to be a different, more bright colour scheme.
The images of all of the band members on the inside cover didn't come across well especially as the images were so dark so this should be changed.
Despite the image being strong for the front cover, it was too dark and doesn't match the colourful nature of our music video so wouldnt promote eachoher effectively.
The silver CD looked cheap and unprofessional and they suggested a design element was used on the CD as this is a convention used on most CD's in the real world.
The fonts used don't suit that of the genre or artist that our digipak is baded on. Suggestions on using the actual logo for Paolo Nutini have been made and we will most likely implement this in our final draft.

Action Plan:

One of the main negatives for our first draft was the fact that the colour scheme didn't match that of the video so we would need to choose brighter more vibrant colours to compare with that of our video.
The images used (particularly the main image) are also too dark so these will need to be changed and new images will need to be taken in order to fit the general brighter look to the digipak that we are going to create.
Changing the main image will most likely make choosing things like colour scheme etc much easier so this will be the first aspect that we will look to base our digipak on.
The layout will remain almost the same depending on what features we choose to add to create a more authentic look.
Consistency of house style was the main positive to take away from our first draft so this will be accounted for when we make our final draft.
We will ensure that we use Paolo Nutini's actual logo on our digipak as well as using a font that complements this for the other writing on the digipak.

Edited photos for our first draft: