The Creation of our Digipak / Front Panel

As you can see to the left, this is our final draft for the front cover of our digipak. Underneath the album title, ‘DARK VELVET’, we have featured the image of the red roses which is subtly shown throughout the music project. The continuity of the red rose does not only purposefully connote the theme of love, but it also creates a sense of loyalty and security for the audience who have seen the music promo. We used the application Photoshop CS6 to alter the original photo into a conceptual image which fits our particular genre. In order to find the best fitting image for our digipak, we took several still images of the roses before they started to decay; however, we found the perfect image by taking a screenshot from a time lapse video instead. The darker roses which align perpendicular to one another depict the cynical aspects of their relationship; the term ‘wake up and smell the roses’ inspired us to represent the negative realism which can come with love.  We used a roman italic font from the website www.dafont.com, I thought it was fitting for the album cover as it is neutral yet rather edgy. Sticking to the colour black for our font was a good idea as it sat comfortably against the white background, this worked as it is incapable of clashing and looks elegant.

We started off with a screenshotted image of a single rose.

Using the magic wand tool, we removed the images background which was unnecessary for our digipak.

Then we had to duplicate this transparent rose 3 times. ‘1.Layer (Control Panel) 2.Duplicate Layer'

We then repositioned and flipped the rose to put them into formation.

Inserting the font was the easiest step of creating the digipak.

Copy and pasted the words straight from dafont.com.

Removed the background using the magic wand tool.

To make sure that the white background didn’t get lost in the edges, we added a black boarder around the edges from the controls panel. We imported an image of a black square and adjusted the size of the edges using the transform control in the upper left hand corner. To achieve perfection, we duplicated the first layer 3 times to get the equality of the measurements. Finally, it was time to put our name on the cover, we chose a cool font on the same website and put it against a black background to make the artist ‘The xx’ noticeable and important.

To add a solid white background colour we had to drag a white square into the middle of the image, after this we had to make this the first layer meaning that everything else is placed on top of the background, making sure it is all visible.