Digipak annotation..

The Front cover..
I decided that I wanted to have me and Beste on the front cover of my digipak as I liked the idea of featuring the artists on the front, so that people can identify who we are in our music video. I used Adobe Photoshop to enhance the contrast of the photo so that we could stand out more. I then opened up our logo in a separate tab, selected all, copied and then pasted it on top of our photo. Our logo obviously had a white background which I removed using the magic eraser tool, a very lengthy process, having so many separate bits to our logo. This then allowed the logo to sit nicely on top of our photo without a white background separating it. Finally I added in the album name which I chose to be our main song  'The Potential Breakup Song' as I noticed this is something many artists do, eg Lady Gaga with her album name 'Born This Way' which is one of her songs. I decided to use the font Lucida Calligraphy as it's quite a feminine font and went well with our fancy twirly logo.

The Back Cover..
I quite liked the idea of having both outer covers of my digipak similar, and so I used another image from our photo shoot to feature us again on the back. I needed however to find a picture showing quite a large area of background so that I would be able to include our track list. After carefully selecting an image where we were positioned in such a way to have room for the songs, I again enhanced the contrast of the image to match the front image. I then wrote out our final track list on Microsoft word, in the same Lucida Calligraphy font and copied and pasted it onto our image. I again used the Magic eraser tool to rid of the white background making the text sit on top of the image. I then moved on to making my bar code which I made using software such as Photoshop and Microsoft Word. I found an image on clip art which I used as a template to help me make my own. I used the line tool on Photoshop to create different sized lines and carefully placed them together. I then looked at a selection of different bar codes on Cd's I had at home and discovered that they all had 13 numbers. I therefore decided to also include 13 numbers when making my own.

Here is my bar code..

Below is the text displayed underneath my bar code. From looking at other Cd's I noticed that I had to include executive producers (us), a copyright symbol (made on Microsoft word), a distribution company name which I chose to be called 'Ivory Keys' (inspired from white keys on a piano), as well as a message about violation of the laws. I included this in order to make my work look more professional. I also made sure that I used the same Lucida Calligraphy font so that my digipak remained consistent throughout.

Inside Left

I wanted to make the inside fairly different to the outside, and so I picked a colourful more quirky image. We both really liked the idea of writing messages on balloons, so we decided to experiment with this idea and took some pictures. I feel that it reflects our youthful ditzy characters as artists. On Photoshop I enhanced the contrast making the balloons appear brighter in order to stand out more. I also used the clone stamp to cover the drain in the background with grass so that it didn't distract from the balloons which are the focus.

Inside Right

I found this particular side of my digipak the hardest. I decided to incorporate the idea of our animation into the CD design and so using the paint tool on Photoshop I created my own picture using ideas I'd gathered from Google. I tried many different background designs to go behind the CD however I felt that the colours didn't particularly go with the inside left. Each time I tried a new background I had to use the eraser tool to erase the CD section, carefully keeping within its outline. After many attempts of this I finally found a picture of some daisies which I took on holiday, as the green colour went well with the picture on the inside left design. I used the fading eraser tool and with a brush size of 300 I carefully erased the CD section. However half way through I noticed that the faded effect looked quite effective and inspired the idea of having the CD piecing together with the background so that when it's put in its case the background image matches with it.

Here are some of the other designs I had made which were slightly more simple as I was still in the process of getting used to Photoshop..

I quite liked this design however i felt that it looked slightly plain and so I wanted to experiment more with using a picture rather than just a colour.

This Background image above was a replica of the image on the left hand side of my digipak however I felt that this would have looked fairly repetitive and boring having it on both sides.

 This is the background image in the design above, the disc would have sat on top However the colour on the outside edge did not appear to go well with the inside left design.

Here's a reminder of my final design. I asked some members of my family for advise and they said that I needed to enlarge the logo as they were unable to see what it said. I took their advise and enlarged it and I agree that it looks much better.

Spine

In order to make the spine of my CD design I decided to use the logo which I made when me and Beste were working on our final design. It's basically a simpler version of our actual logo, the title of our band in a twirly font, minus all the other bits around it, as these wouldn't all fit on the spine. I again used the cupids and hearts as these are an on going theme throughout our work.