Polaroid idea..

We were really interested in bringing in the theme of polaroid pictures, as they carry with them connotations of home made, DIY style artwork and style. I was researching some other bands and artwork that include polaroid style photographs. 

I found this album on the internet,  the album  package consists of 144 polaroid photos that unfold into a 2x2 square, and the pictures, when viewed from afar, blend to form the 'No Code' triangle/eyeball logo that is the theme throughout the album - I really liked this album, as it really cleverly uses polaroids to create the image that defines the album - which is what we have aimed for with the record within our album package. 

The main focus of this album cover is one large polaroid picture with the album art inside it. 

The use of scattered polaroid images in this album cover is something we think is really successful and looks really DIY, as if the pictures have just been taken and dropped straight to the floor. 

This album artwork is a set of polaroid pictures which work to show the narrative and establish the characters of this band and particular song/video.

A mixture of one original image, overlaid with polaroid pictures is a combination we've decided we definitely want to achieve when making our digi-pack.

This particular band is actually called 'Polaroid',  their artwork for this particular album includes both a record and polaroid cameras with pictures coming out of them, defining the two most important features of our digi-pak ideas. 

Rough idea

This is our rough idea of what we want the music video to include - we know we want to incorporate the record used in our video as an intertextual link, we want screenshots from the video to feature, in a polaroid kind of style; connoting more of a DIY feel and style - also having our lyrics written in a hand made kind of style, as if written by the artist when composing the song, will help add to this feel as well. We definitely want it to have the DIY homemade feel to it, because this features often in indie music and videos, and it is something we have embraced and strived to achieve - without it just looking mediocre and UNintentionally DIY..

Example digi-pak..

When researching images for the previous post, one of the album covers found had with it an image of the opened out digi-pak. We thought this one was really impressive, and has features we will definitely take inspiration and ideas from. The use of the record image on the front is the initial element that appealed to us for the project we are doing, then the use of cartoon 'doodle' style imagery is something we have incorporated in our music video and will endeavor to include on the digi-pak, as it follows the conventions of our video, and links to the desires of indie-rock audience of the 'DIY' appearance. The way the artwork continues throughout the digi-pak as one whole image is something we think looks very attractive, and definitely makes it a more desireable and admired product that a consumer would be inclined to buy, rather than just downloading the music off the internet.

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.