Questionnaire and Results - Digipak

In order to gain information and audience feedback on how I should go about designing my own digipak, I have constructed a questionnaire in order to investigate. I asked twenty people these questions:

My results are shown below.

Firstly all but one person preferred a CD Digipak compared to the original jewel case. This proves that the digipak really is a more popular choice in the 21st century and the reasons for its popularity include it being more dependable, professional and including more variety for the buyer.

Gender and Preferred Album CoverThe results show that Lily Allen's "Alright Still" proved to be the most popular album cover among females and overall. However males preferred Blink 182's album cover, calling it artistic and fun looking. "Alright Still" proved to be popular due to it's female gaze and eye catching images as well as its overall "fun" tone.

Type of Imagery

These results show that Pop Art and photography proved to be the most popular imagery preferred on an album cover. I want to incorporate Pop Art/Cartoon imagery onto my digipak anyway to create synergy between the digipak and music video.

Other results included bold font and handwritten fonts as well as dark colours proving to be popular among the twenty candidates.

Further Research On Album Covers

An album cover is the front of the packaging of a commercially-released audio recording product, or album. The term can refer to either the printed cardboard covers or the front-facing panel of a CD package and increasingly, the primary image accompanying a digital download of the album or its individual tracks.

The cover of an album serves 3 purposes:

1. To advertise the contents of the music product.
2. To convey the artistic aspirations of the artist.
3. In reproductions of the artwork, it serves as a primary image in the promotional efforts surrounding the product.

Early History

Around the year 1910, 78 rpm records replaced phonograph cylinder as the medium for recorded sound. They were usually issued in 10" and 12" diameter sizes and sold separately, in brown or cardboard sleeves that were sometimes plain and sometimes printed to show the producer or the retailer's name. German record company Odeon pioneered the first "album" in 1909 when it released the "Nutcracker Suite" by Tchaikovsky on 4 doubled-sided discs in a specially designed package.

In the 1920's, bound collections of empty sleeves with a plain cardboard or leather cover were sold as "record albums". The covers of these bound books were wider and taller than the records inside, allowing the record album to be placed upright on a shelf like a book, protecting the fragile record.

In the 1930's, record companies began issuing collections of 78 rpm records by one performer or of one type of music in specially assembled albums. In 1938 Columbia Records hired Alex Steinweiss as its first art director, who is credited with inventing the concept of album covers and cover art, replacing plain covers used before.


Format
Since the 1990s, the CD has become the most common form of physically distributed music products. Packaging formats vary from, including the common plastic jewel case and the popular cardboard and plastic combination known as the Digipak.



Design
The cover became an important part of the culture of music. As a marketing tool and an expression or artistic intent, gatefold covers, and inserts often with lyric sheets, made the album cover a desirable "artifact" in its own right. Examples include The Beatles "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Brigade" and Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon". The importance of the cover design was so important that some artists specialised or gained fame through their work, notably the design team Hipgnosis. The talents of many photographers and illustrators from inside and outside the music industry have been used to produce a vast array of memorable album covers. These include Andy Warhol for The Rolling Stones, Jamie Reid for The Sex Pistols and Rex Ray for David Bowie.

Packaging
The album cover is a component of the overall packaging of an album. Besides identifying specific records, they serve the purpose of advertising the mucsical contents on the LP, through the use of graphic design, photography and illustration. It normally has the artist's name, sometimes in logo form; and the album title.
Occasionally, though more common on historical vinyl records, the cover may include a reference number; a branding (the label), and possibly a track listing.

Album Cover Analysis

To gather further ideas into how the group and myself would design our own album cover and as part of the ancillary task, I have researched into Pop Rock album covers that convey the types of images and connotations I would like to use for my own cover. These 3 album covers in my opinion are good examples and motivation for the creation of my own. They are the debut album's of Lily Allen's "Alright Still", Miley Cyrus' "Breakout" and Katy Perry's "One of the Boys".

Editing

After the problem of losing the majority of our work, the team continued the editing process, confident we would be able to reproduce and improve our music music video. As we followed our storyboards this made the editing uncomplicated, and the first 23 seconds were edited. The transitions that were included were:

Jump Cut

The jump cut was dominantly used to speed up the scenes where our characters were walking down the road to the speed date. The fast action appeals to the comic book influences and it also created an upbeat, fun feel to the scene and played on the beats of the music.

Wipe

Playing three scenes together would be too time consuming in editing, along with the fact that the software did not include this transition and so a wipe transition was applied as a substitute. It reinforced the chronology of the dates, first the Punk, then the Hunk and finally the geek (Superman) and turned out to be extremely effective, showing the differences and distinctions between the three dates.

Dream Effect

The dream effect was added to the scenes of the characters walking down the road to the speed dating event. It creates a relevance between the characters and the sign, but also adds to a surreal, unrealistic tone found in comic books, which was important in our research and planning ideas.

Editing Problem

It was discovered that the editing we had completed at the City Learning Centre last month had disappeared as it was not saved and so we had only 8 seconds of footage, rather than the previous 28. In this time we had manage to input the beat marks at the point of the beat in the music to allow for a transition to occur. As the beats were sharp, it allowed for a change of shot to happen every half a second. It was not possible to recover the missing file, although iMovie automatically saves any changes you make it seemed strange that the work had gone missing and it was not on the hard drive either. Therefore the production team have agreed to start our editing from scratch. Although time consuming, we can also improve on the work we have already completed.

The Digipak

A digipak is the alternative to standard jewel case packaging. Made mostly from thick card, it is virtually shatterproof and allows great graphic display. Originally used for the album packaging of leading muscians, the digipak and digipak family are now priced reasonably enough to be used for any CD or DVD project/ It is an extremely versatile packaging and can be made to accomodate a booklet. In addition, the panels can be increased from 4 to 6, 8 or more.

They make a big statement, they represent the ultimare custom packaging for your CD replication project. A digipak is also a more environmentally friendly option when compared with traditional plastic jewel cass of DVD cases. Dimensions based on a standard 4pp digipak are 139.5mm x 6mm x 125.5mm.

Album Cover Iconography

I have looked into a number of images which I hope to convey in my own album cover for the genre/pop rock. This included colours, symbolism, images and font.