Final Website

Click here to see the live website homepage

Final Digipak

Here is the complete copy of our digipak. AS you can see there are four panels That are very similar in style giving the digipak consistency. This gives us a house style that is similar to a magazine and therefore gives the band an image to go with their sound. This image can often be better known than a bands' music. A great example of this is The Sex Pistols album cover.

Digipak Stages

Website Elements

The website is made up of a few different elements that go further than just using the pre-set add ons in Dreamweaver.
The most noticeable one is the use of animation that I made in Adobe Flash. I made the title, menu system and banner in there which gives the website a more exciting feel as it is not static. Interactive features like this keep the user more involved in the website and are less likely to move from it. A music artist's website must do this to keep the user on it long enough to convince them to buy their music or watch videos.

Another element i have put on our website is an input area for users. This is for a username and password. This is where users would log in who had signed up to the band's website gaining them access further information, a less dedicated user could not reach otherwise.

Website Elements Inspiration

Original Images

Band Logo

This is an image that Jack designed to become our band image. It has a futuristic feel and is very simple. We shall use this on the digipak as well as the website. This is because a band's logo is iconic. A great example of this is ACDC. They have a simple logo consisting of ACDC but the font used is iconic and when seen a person automatically knows it is them.

Website Development

Here is our first draft of our website for the digipak. I created this in Dreamweaver and used past knowledge to come up with this. Showing it to the group we decided that it was good and elements of it could be used but overall it was too messy. This lead to us de-cluttering the website to make it sleeker and look more professional. A starting point would be to take the images away from the sides. This is because a website does not have to have a strong link with a music video but should reference to it as well as a digipak.
Here was our second draft of the website. You can clearly see a strong hint of our first draft with the same colours and layout being used. The fonts were changed and size of some of the parts of the website have been changed. Overall a large improvement has been made as the website looks professional due to its minimalistic look and it also has a futuristic look to it with the colours. This fits the band well with their electronica music.

Digipak Development

Above are images of how we have produced the rest of our digipak. It is clear to see a theme throughout the digipak with the colours and the glow on all the text. We like this digipak as it has a futuristic feel to it and very simple. However, we do not feel it is strong enough to be a digipak and will be hard to design inside panels for it. This is because it will be hard to create something different to the Spirograph and still fit with the existing digipak.

Digipak, Draft Two

Here is a design for the back of our digipak. We are trying to continue the theme of the front panel by having the glow behind the text. We got the colour of the glow from the Spirograph on the front cover. We managed to keep a simplistic feel to the back cover by only having the glow and names of the songs that would be on the album.

The above images of our digipak are good. I believe they carry on the house style of the front cover and also support the simple theme we are trying to create. With having little information on the back I believe a user will enjoy the digipak as it was what the purpose of the back of a digipak has. I still believe it will be hard to create the remaining two panels of out digipak following this theme without it becoming boring.

Digipak, First Draft

The image above is out first draft of our album artwork which will be the first page of our digipak. We had all, as a group, decided the front cover should be simple as looking through existing album covers a reoccurring theme was evident that a lot of album covers do not relate to the band.

Jack then had the idea to use a Spirograph image as the album cover. This is because he felt it had the potential to look futuristic and is very simple to create, although very hard to look professional. With the hope of it looking futuristic it will fit with the bands electronic music style and tie in the artist with the imagery.

We added effects to the original white drawing on a black background. This gave it a glow and an edge to just a flat drawing. The Spirograph itself looks 3D and stands away from the background. We decided to place the logo of the band in the center of the album artwork to be seen whilst remaining hidden until closer viewing.

Overall we feel positive about this first draft of our digipak. However, i believe it will be hard to create four panels for this digipak without it being boring and too simple that it loses its impact and people do not notice it amongst other digipaks in a record store.

Digipak Ideas

Above is a quick mock of an album artwork we could work on. It has a strong theme from the music video as the two main characters are on the front. However, the images are not particularly good and it is not the style we want for our digipak.

Possible Logo Designs

Digipak Inspiration

Here is a mood board of existing album artwork in the music industry. These chosen images are what we are using as inspiration. This is because all the images on the covers on a CD show us that it does not have to link with the band or make sense. Using this idea of not relating to the album, song or band we shall create our own cover as part of a digipak

Website Inspiration

Above are websites that our group have said are inspiring and we should take aspects of these websites. As you can see they are all simple and do not have a lot on the home page causing it to be busy. A busy website is the easiest way to prevent someone looking at the website as too much information will prevent someone actually looking through it and reading bits they like. By having a simple website information would be found easily meaning it has good user usability.

Some of the aspects we liked from these websites are:

Video,

Scroll Box,

Members sign in,

Interesting Menu,

Links to external sites,

Clear information