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.

The Creation of our Digipak / The Back Panel

This is the fourth and final panel for our digipak, the back panel. To include synergy in our advertisement, we repeated the logo design from the front panel, however, to create a sense of edginess and quirk, we altered the red colour to blue. We added the usual content for a panel which we discovered through doing research, for example the track names, the album title, the record label and even the barcode. Choosing the background colour for this panel proved to be easy, we copied the plain white from the front and used it again; this was because it seemed best to keep the focus on the symbolic roses and not take away the importance. After experimenting with solid colour backgrounds we came to the conclusion that anything other than white clashes and also looked a bit tacky.

Using the same panel measurements as before, we imported the rose image from the front panel onto a plain white background. We adjusted the colour from red to blue by changing the colour balance which is located in the control panel. 

Adding the track names was the easy part. We simply copied the title from the front panel and made it a layer on the back; we positioned it in alignment with our blue roses to make it look central and neat. Cordelia and I spent a bit of time brainstorming track names for the album, we came up with the following 7 names which we thought portrayed emotion and worked with our indie genre.

TRACK NAMES: 

NIGHT TIME

HELLO STRANGER

ONE OF THOSE DAYS

LOST 

MIDNIGHT

VINTAGE 

DARK SKIES 

The next step was to credit the record label 'XL Recordings' by inserting their logo in the bottom left hand corner. Like other album covers which we have researched, we must include a barcode and possibly a website address to the bands official link; we also added these in the corner to make sure we didn't draw attention from the main attractions, our logo and our track names.

First Draft

Here is our first draft:

A problem which we encountered towards the final parts of post production, was the end of our music promo; to use the symbolism of the rose decaying we decided it would be a nice way to end the story to show the relationship is over, if we finished with the dead rose. We intended for the decaying rose to time lapse which would fit with the beat of the music perfectly for a well cut ending. After several attempts, we could not make the video flow, this was because the product we were trying to work with was images, meaning the software was not happy with putting them so close together. Hours had passed and we were close to giving up, until we realised that we had not rendered the project; we carried out the rendering and finally our video was in sync with the music.

The red bar at the top helped us notice that we hadn't rendered the piece.