Final draft of digipak

(click to enlarge)

Here is the final draft of our digipak, which sees the finished design of all four panels and how it would appear as an unfolded album. We were very faithful to the original ideas as can be seen in the sketches previously posted, adding colour, in a very childlike fashion, to rough sketches that were desired to conform to certain conventions of indie album covers, such as that of Jason Mraz's album "We sing. We dance. We steal things." Although he is not typically associated with the genre, his style of acoustic music could be and the album cover, as seen below, embodies the same style of childish sketching that our digipak trys to. The face seen on the cover is loosely drawn with no great care taken to make the drawing perfect and this relates completely to the way we used sketchy and loose drawing as the background for every panel, using a real photograph on the front cover.

This combining of medias can also be seen to echo that seen in albums such Santogold's self titled album "Santogold", as seen below, seeing photography being manually manipulated with the use of glitter.

• The front panel is simplistic in its design and we did not deviate from our initial ideas much at all. The artist's portrait is a crucial feature as it is one thing to promote the album but by having the artist as part of the album cover there will be an instant association created in the audience's mind which will ultimately help better the sale of the album and band. The artist is also placed in the centre of the frame so as to accentuate her importance and to an extent, her fame.
• The band's name, The Joy Formidable, is placed at the top of the frame in a different font and style of writing to the the rest of the words on the cover, this positioning and font shows the band's importance and fame. This positioning also corresponds to most album covers, regardless of genre, in that to promote the band to their full extent they are usually placed at the highest point of the frame, the top. This aspect is also seen in the two examples above as well as our own product.
• The background of the panel is the forest and sees intertextuality in play as it links directly to one of the locations used in pour music video. This background of the forest is the are in which the artist is shot in the video as well as the area in which the character of the girl ends in at the end, so there is automatically a link with the artist as well as the video production. This association will ensure a sense of memorability, promoting the band in the subtlest way possible, subliminally.
• The inside left and right panels see the setting of the digipak change, slowly morphing into an urban setting of a brick wall. The inside left panel sees a brick wall slowly emerging through the trees although the trees remain the prominent aspect of the image, linking to the video again and echoing the sense of the girl being very much in control of her life and to extent, her sanity. This is completely contradicted by the inside right which sees the brick wall very dominant with only a few branches crossing the bricks. This now represents the idea of her insanity deteriating further and it is completely gone by the time we reach the final panel which is complete brick. The transition from urban to rural echos that seen in the music video.