Records..

 

Again from audience research we conducted in the research and planning stages of making out music videos, we established an iconic sign that indicates and features highly within indie-rock genre music videos/album covers/band artwork/advertising campaigns etc. We have incorporated this into our video by beginning the sequence with a record player starting up as the audio does, and ending it with the record stopping in time with the fade out of the song. We therefore want to make this image of a record a key feature of our whole digi-pak design and style, I wanted to find some examples of existing uses of records in album art to maybe gain some inspiration on how to incorporate them into the image and pack.  

Style inspiration

 From our questionnaire, and existing knowledge we knew an element admired by indie-rock audiences for their albums art is having elements of black and white imagery, as well as having some colour featuring. We really liked the style and idea of having a mainly washout image, but with one or several key colours picked out across the image. We like this idea especially for our digi-pak as we have already incorporated it into the design for the record in our music video, where there is hand drawn image of some books, some of which are filled with block colour, and the rest are black and white.

I researched on the internet some existing examples of this kind of style, and found several album covers, most of which similar if not the same as our genre, although some varying slightly. They all make use of picking specific colours to stand out, either against black and white, or in place of real-life colours.

Shout Out Loud's Posters and Adverts

From these posters and adverts it is clear the the Shout Out Louds have consistent design elements in all of their promotional work - from these images we can see their use of simplistic, basic colouring as their posters all focus on one main stand out colour, or little use of it. 

We also established that they consistently use simple, bold and clear typography in all of their work, to ensure immediate recognition and avoid misunderstanding and confusion. We will definitely take on this feature of clear typography in our magazine advert as it is extremely important for the band to be immediately recognisable and the audience no exactly what the advert is for as soon as they see it.  

Magazine Advert

I thought it would be a good idea to analyse an exsisting magazine advert for a band/album to understand what is expected of an ad, and what vital elements should be included and what is not so important.




Here we can see the digi-pak cover for the album being advertised on the abover spread. The imagery is the same on the advert as that of the album cover, therefore ensuring recognition of band and album when seeing the ad, and/or finding and buying the physical album.



Radiohead - Digital or Physical

I was looking on the NME music magazine website to try and get some examples of advertising campaigns for bands and songs, and to maybe gain some further ideas of what is expected of a digi-pak and what we definitely should try to include.

We knew as a group that in this day and age, purchasing a physical album is a lot less likely than downloading it off the internet; therefore we knew that for a digi-pak to be successful it needs to stand out and be something audiences WANT to own, rather than being something to store the disc in that ultimately ends up taking up space on a shelf.

I came across a feature about the new 'Radiohead' album 'King of Limbs' and there was an interesting thing about the releasing and buying of albums in our current society:

"In an essay on censorship he wrote last September, Colin Greenwood referred to a batch of new songs and said the band had 'begun to wonder about how to release them in a digital landscape that has changed again.'

Turns out the answer is: pretty much the same way they released 'In Rainbows' (i.e as a surprise). By offering two versions - the music-only download, and the 'premium' physical edition - they're embracing the digital era while rewarding more committed fans." [http://www.nme.com/]

From what Radiohead are doing in releasing their album digitally, as well as offering a "premium" physical version, we can see that current indie-rock bands want to keep the physical album alive, and keep providing their most loyal fans with good quality, treasurable album packs that will be admired and purchased almost as a separate product as well as the music - rather than just having the songs downloaded on their computers and ipods. This has encouraged us to try and make our digi-pak almost a piece of art in itself, instead of just a sleeve to hold the disc, because if we were making a real product to put on the market, it wouldn't sell unless it was something different, special, and sought after by our target audience. 

Questionare..

In today's lesson we compiled a questionare to help us gain information on what will and what won't be well received by our target audience. The questionare was made up of several closed and open questions that would hopefully give us indication of what to include within the appearance of the album cover, and also the content e.g lyrics, band information etc. We posed the questions to a small portion of our target audience; 16-24 year old males and females who are fans of the indie-rock music genre. 
We currently have the results from this in a grid, but we will endeavour to put the ones we can into a simplified graph format to put on our blogs, as so to make clear the reasons and intentions behind decisions we will make for the design of the digi-pak.


Some graphs:

Ancillary Tasks initial ideas..

For our ancillary tasks we must firstly design and create an appropriate digipak/album artwork for our song and video - therefore it must be similar in genre, style and feel to our video production. THEN create an A4 magazine spread advertising our band and video..

We haven't yet carried out our questionare or done in depth research, these are just our initial musings surrounding the task of the digipak. A couple of album covers that we already knew of, of bands that are within the indie rock genre can be seen below;

We particularly liked these album covers as they were good inspiration for our own work as we knew, from the style and features of our music video, that we wanted elements of hand drawn style imagery, as well as photographic snapshots of the video - which can be seen in the 'Wombats' album art, where the background image is a photograph, but the typography is made to look scruffy and hand drawn. Again with the Mika one, there is a photograph of Mika himself, surrounded by cartoon images, and the typography again appears hand written - we definitely wish to take this recurrent idea on board with our design, and work on a font that we can create by hand to use for the typography on our front cover i.e title of song/band, and to use inside or on the back for other information such as song lyrics, band information etc. Using a font that appears hand drawn, I think, is a really indie-rock feature, that I've seen a lot, and think looks really effective in creating the D.I.Y style that is desired by indie-rock fans. It also links well to our video as we used hand drawn animation and typography over the top of our shots to create an individual, indie style.