A2 Media Studies: CD Digipack

Research : The History Of The Album Cover

The first disc records, ones that we would recognize as such, appeared around 1910. Most often these were packaged in plain brown Paper or cardboard sleeves. Occasionally and enterprising retailer would print his store name on the sleeve but generally they were unadorned.

In the early 1920's retailers started gathering many of these cardboard sleeves and binding them together with heavy paperboard or leather covers. These looked similar to large photo albums and, borrowing the name, were sold as record albums. These albums offered much greater protection for the discs than the original packaging and were seen as indispensible to disc owners that had seen too many of their fragile records broken.

Beginning in the 1930s the record companies started using these record albums to distribute bundles of records from one performer or a collection of performers with similar musical styles. Some of the first cover designs can be traced to these albums and the record company’s desire to graphically communicate the music each album held.

Alex Steinweiss the art director for Columbia Records is given credit for the concept of modern cover art. He experimented with different concepts and images through the late 1930s and into the early 1940s. During this time Columbia Records rebounded from the terrible years they had suffered during the depression to become one of the most prominent record companies in the United States. Much of this was due to their ground breaking use of graphical design. By the close of the decade all major recording companies had graphic design professionals on staff.

The golden era of cover art design began in the early to mid 1960s and lasted into the early 1980s. During this time the major format for music was the 12 inch, long play disc or LP. Cover art became a part of the musical culture of the time. Often used to express graphically the musician’s artistic intent, it helped connect and communicate to listeners the message or underlying theme of the album.

Designers, photographers, and illustrators sometimes became famous for their cover art creations. Such notables as Andy Warhol and Frank Frazetta were taken from being known in their industry to becoming household names due to their cover art graphic design work. So respected and desired are the designs and illustrations found in cover art that there are numerous art galleries that specialize in helping collectors find rare album covers.

As the medium for recording transitioned from the LP to the compact disc many graphic designers failed to transition with it. Having worked for so long with the much larger canvas of the LP cover, switching to the smaller CD case left most designers dissatisfied with their results. Often artist and record companies simply tried to shrink the LP size art to fit the CD.

Album cover art, now almost exclusively CD and CD packaging artwork, went through a period of change and rebirth in the 1990s. Designers learned to capture snapshots and portions of the artist’s musical intent rather than trying to convey the entire message. Also designers started conveying the emotion of the music rather than the musical intent.

In the late 90s computer design programs started to overcome the physical limitations of the smaller CD packaging. With the ability to draw much tighter, finer lines and have even small details look crisp and sharp, once again designers were free to explore a larger variety of design options. As the technology continued to improve graphic designers adapted and were once again producing world class artwork.

In the present, CD design is undergoing a true renaissance. Rather than becoming obsolete in the digital age as many thought it would, graphic design is once again proving itself as the difference maker. The internet is now the largest record store imaginable. Now rather than browsing a few hundred albums or songs at a time you may be exposed to thousands and thousands. Since it would be impossible to listen to portions of all those thousands of songs the design of the accompanying artwork must cause potential listeners to stop and take notice and give this album a try.

A History of Album Artwork and Its Implications in Marketing: A TCU Documentary

Research : CD Digipacks Existing Products

From doing this task I have learned the basics from what is expected from a music digipack such as the conventions, style and what is is required to make a well done digipack. Analysing specific areas of existing digipacks gave us a good idea on what to incorporate to our own digipack when we go to plan our digipack

How the codes work in digipacks are our brain picks out key information that is translated to collorate to a specific genre or theme to something, for example when looking at shape large black font, the first thing to come to mind isn't a party song, what would be perceived from this code is that the genre is heavy metal and rock.

Another example of a code that be extracted from an image is if it were a well lit picture that has more vibrant colours like a bright red or blue. These bright colours and few shadows would make the song most likely be a pop song that is very lively such as Happy by Pharrell Williams.

Other ways that a digipack can be deconstructed in the mind is in the positioning of the image as well as the font that is chosen. An album cover with a girl directly in the middle facing down with low lighting would be seen as a emotional and even an emo-like song, if the font was faint and dark coloured, it would also help the dark depressing theme of the song.

Planning Own CDD

Before moving on with the CDD we would have to plan ahead for what it would look like briefly, knowing this Sam took some drawing based on the idea we both had in mind for the CDD, the picture of the drawing is below.

Practice Photoshop

Before moving ahead with the construction and building of my CD Digipack or Music Magazine, I felt it was necessary to practice with the application Photoshop as I was new to it. Playing around with Photoshop would enable me to have a brief understanding on how it is used and know what tools I would need for the finished project.

To begin practicing with Photoshop I first opened up an A4 blank document to start making an exemplar Music Magazine Advertisement (MMA). I started with the MMA rather than the CDD as it is more basic and requires less skill for the making of it.

After opening up a blank document with margins to make sure the important things are kept within, I inserted a landscape image of Taylor Swift to use as practice. When choosing my image I knew I would have to resize it, baring this in mind I chose a very high quality picture of Taylor Swift so that when I increase the size of the image it will not lose its original aspect ratio.

Now I have the picture in my workspace, I magnified the size of the image to fit the entire page to resemble a MMA. When making the picture bigger I locked the aspect ratio so the picture was not horizontally or vertically squished when modifying it.

After I was happy with the positioning and size of the image I then moved onto adding text which I felt should have a basic and bold font as it would go well with the simplicity of the image chosen. The font I chose was Arial Black and had it at a big size.

When deciding the positioning of the text I wanted to keep the text off her person, for this I had to decrease the size enough to fit the gap where her body isn't in the way, after that I moved it into place into where was most suitable.

With some peer feedback and myself, we decided the black font stood out too much and another colour would be a better option. As suggested by a peer, I made the colour of the font the same as the colour of Taylor's lips, for this to be done I had to use the eyedropper tool to grab the colour of the pixel on her lips to result in the exact same colour for the font.

After placing her name on the magazine I moved onto putting the album name on to, with this text I decided to try a vertical text and see how it looks. I felt as it worked well with the image when the text was vertical so kept this idea.

Lastly I enlarged the font size as it was too small in comparison to the image and artist title. with this basic practice I felt more confident and enabled to move on to my construction of my actual MMA.

Practice Photography

To help get practise with the camera I decided to take a large number of photos of Sam in different lightings, angles and backgrounds. Although this helped my confidence with the camera, it also gave us an opportunity to decipher a couple of the images to use for our final piece. For evidence of the photography, here are all the photos that were taken in practice.

Construction Screenshots

Before moving forward with out final design of the CD Digipack, I would create a brief mock up of what we are aiming for based on the initial ideas we had from the drawings. After doing so we knew the we were happy with the overall theme and idea of the CDD but we would make some small changes along the way.

The two images I had decided I would be using for the CDD were the following as they looked the clearest and had good high lighting which would help with the lively and up beat theme we were going for.

To begin our CDD I would open the template given to be filled in with our images and content.

I would then find a red image to use as a main background for the CDD.

After I was happy with the colour of the background I would then move onto placing the image I will be using as the inside back cover.

After I had placed the image into the work space, I would begin to remove the red background of the photo using the magic wand tool to leave only Sam's person. When trying to do this step this error appeared so I knew I had to rasterize the smart object.

After I had rasterized the image I was then able to remove majority of the red background from it, as this was not enough to get rid of as much red as I would have hoped I would then use the eraser tool to refine the edges.

After I was done with the eraser tool I would use the smudge tool to smoothen out the edges so it does not look too sharp.

With the image fully cut out I was ready to resize it and move it into place.

Here I would get a brief idea of knowing how it would fit into the cover.

I would then minimize the image holding shift to keep the aspect ratio the same.

After I was done with the inside back cover, I would then move onto the front cover image. I did used the magic wand tool as previous and now I will erase the sharp edges.

With this image fully cropped out I was ready to put the background in and move the two images into place.

After I had moved them into place and was happy with the results I would then move onto adding filters to the two images for a nice blurry and paint effect as the images as they were to surreal.

Here is the image in the filter library before I start looking at filters that would work well.

Here is an example of one we could have gone with but it looked odd and didn't really fit the theme.

Here I am testing what the dry brush effect looks like.

After seeing what rough pastels looked like I was confident that I was aiming for that look on the image.

I would then mix it with the paint dab effect so that it doesn't look too rough.

After seeing that the shade of the red was too violent, I dropped the opacity to 70% so it looked more calm and bright.

I then added an effect to the background so that it would have this black to red gradient in the corners which worked really well with the black top Sam is wearing.