R & P Post 24: Planning my digipak panels

As part of our artist's promotional package, we had to produce a four-panelled digipak. This digipak, the front cover in particular, is a hugely important marketing tool, as it is an image which must stand out enough to appeal and entice potential customers for the album.

This is the template for the digipak panels:

We wanted to follow conventions of existing debut digipak examples, and include relevant institutional & copyright information, a consistent & synergistic colour scheme and a clear, striking focal image. We had to ensure that the images we used stood out enough and varied their shot type to grab the attention of the audience, whilst being representative of our artist, GiGi, and whilst connoting the pop genre.

Phoebe began by sketching some rough initial ideas and showing it to us as a group:

We found this really helpful, as we could visualise our potential digipak ideas, and thus identify what we thought worked and what we didn't like. The initial idea to have a front-and-back view style digipak - similar to Kanye West's early albums - was initially appealing, as it was something different and visually engaging, however we reconsidered, as the back of Georgina's head as one of the images on our digipak panels would have been extremely unappealing. In the end, the two drafts were merged - the draft on the left became the focal image, and the draft on the right (singing) became the back cover.

Inside Panels:

Similarly, at first we liked the inside panels and idea of a throne as a motif associated with GiGi, though we soon realised sourcing, or making any sort of throne would be extremely difficult and impractical. Therefore, I suggested as a replacement to have GiGi appear as though she is signing her name. This is the idea which we eventually kept and continued into the final flat plan.


Decisions:

-Front: We decided to use a MCU shot of GiGi on our front cover, similarly in shot type (and artist pose) to 'Stars Dance' by Selena Gomez. The use of an MCU could clearly show facial expression, whilst the glitter theme (inspired by RED, Hyuna) would remain consistent for synergistic branding.

Back: Similarly to Rihanna's 'Good Girl Gone Bad', we used a longer shot of our artist and positioned it to the left of the back cover. This could create contrast with the closer MCU on the front cover. We found, however, that positioning the barcode and copyright info to the right of the back cover was in fact slightly unconventional  - though we considered this to be a unique aspect of our digipak.

Inside: We wanted to connote GiGi's personality, thus used a more extrovert image similar to 'Call Me Maybe' (Carly Rae Jepsen) plus brighter colours, whilst also reflecting her beliefs - the purple, white and green colour scheme matches that of the Suffragette movement, indicating her feminist beliefs, whilst the continued glitter theme adds synergy to the digipak, as it continues from the front cover.


Producing a flat plan for our digipak panels was massively important in gaining a clear picture of how our final album cover could look, and so that we as a group could make adjustments before we produced the final version.e.