Finishing the Digipak

After selecting, editing and finalising all of the photographs for our Digipak, the only thing left to do was create the finishing touches. All that was left to do was create the folds for down the sides of the Digipak which is the 'spine' of the case.
We knew it just had to be kept simple and the design had to be clear and legible as this is the part of the CD case youd see if it was on your shelf amongst other CDs.

Digipak CD Page 2

This is the finished product of our second CD page..


I think this image turned out really well as there is no blurr on this photograph and I like the composition of the feet and the fact they are all different colours. I think we have chosen well for the CD pages as they work well with eachother as they sort of contrast eachother by one of them having our feet going inwards in the photo and the other is our heads facing out of the shot.

Digipak CD Page 1

This is how the first of our pictures turned out after cropping it to a square and editing it fully.

We tried to make it so that the space between our heads was in the centre so that the thing holding the CD in place wouldnt cover us.

The only thing I would like to change about the final outcome of this picture is the blurriness. We tried to sharpen the image as much as we could but it started to look distorted. However we decided it wouldn't be too noticeable or let the digipak down as you probably couldn't tell too much because of the size it would be printed out at.

Digipak CD Pages

When we were designing the two sides that would be used as pictures underneath where the CD would be held in the Digipak, we noticed that we had two photos in our bunch that would be perfect for this.

We selected these photos as they included us all and there was a place in the middle of each to place the holder that keeps the CD in the pack.

These were the original pictures..

Again, we decided to enhance the photos by greyscaling the backgrounds, increasing the saturation and contrast. This was to make it look high quality and professional

Digipak Inside Middle Page - Final Draft

After carrying out the design plan we ended up with this..

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During the editing process we chose to blurr the edges so that it wasnt too obvious that they were seperate photographs. We also added in some signature style fonts with our names so that people buying it could be familiar with the members and know who's who.

Digipak Middle Inside Page

We had an idea that our middle inside page (the page in between the two outer folding parts when the digipak is opened) should be a picture of all 4 of us individually as all the other photos we took were group photos of us all together and we didnt want all of the sides to look samey.

We looked through the photos again and decided on the singular photos of us that we wanted to use.
we chose these..

To create the inside image, we planned on rescaling the images, making them square, greyscaling the background, increasing the saturation/contrast etc as we did on our other photos and putting them all together in a set of four.

Digipak Back Page - Final Draft

We all agreed that our draft was the design that we were definitely going to use as the final design. There were just a few adjustments that we all discussed about the first draft such as moving the bar code away from being directly in the corner and making it a bit bigger to look more realistic and in scale with the picture. Also we looked back at some examples of back pages of albums from our previous research and some new ones too and took the overlapping features we noticed that made CDs look professional and sophisticated.
We noticed from this we needed to add in some logos that are placed with the copyright text to do with record company labels and logos for other aspects associated with creating the CD.
After making all these minor adjustments that would make a big difference our finalised version of the back page looked like this...

Digipak Back Page - First Draft

This is how the picture turned out after it had been cropped to the square size we needed it to be to ensure it fit onto the actual digipak model we were filling with our images. We agreed it looked slightly off centred but there was nothing we could do because that was the way we had taken the photograph and it was the only version of it we had. We thought that after more editing and putting on the text it would even it out and make the gap at the top less prominent.

Just as a trial idea, I decided to keep the photograph itself in an oblong shape which initially did look okay as it didn't cut any part of us off the picture, but soon I realised it was going to look totally odd next to the other pictures as none of them have borders around them so would be bad for the continuity.

We reverted back to our original idea of just cropping the photo as best as we could. We then added the title, song names, bar code and copyright to make it look as authentic as we could and it turned out like this...

Digipak Back Page - Research & Editing the Photos

Firstly, I wanted to conduct a bit of research into what makes a back cover look professional.
I looked on google images for examples of good and bad back covers of other various artists.

Good examples;

Bad examples;

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During the photoshoot we had a good idea for the back page of our album where the tracklisting would be, we decided to make a 'frame' with our arms in a square shape and thought that the track names would look good inside.

This is the original photograph which we would then greyscale in the background to create continuity throughout the album design as our other photos have all had the same thing done.

This is how the picture turned out after being edited on photoshop so the background was greyscaled and the contrast, saturation and sharpness were increased slightly to give a more crisp and professional effect. Now we needed to crop it to a square shape to fit perfectly onto the real life blank digipak and add the tracklisting etc.

Digipak Front Cover - Final Draft

After selecting our fonts and colours, the next step was to put them on to the background picture



We placed the title at the top and in a bigger font so that people would realise it was the band name. It fit perfectly in the sky section of the picture and stood out against the background.
We then placed the title at the bottom as we didn't want it to overlap onto us and there was plenty room to fit it in. We chose to keep the colour pink, as that was the one colour we were all wearing and wanted the font to relate to the picture. We made it a bit darker so that it wasn't all the same and it went well with the darker tone of the sand but at the same time didn't blend in.
This is the finished product for the front cover which we are very satisfied with

Digipak Front Cover - First Draft

After completing the editing and cropping for the front cover photo we then carried on to adding the other features that would make our front cover look professional and of a high standard.

We browsed a font webiste (dafont.com) to find a few samples of suitable fonts. When selecting our fonts, we were looking to find a font that was modern, quirky and youthful. We also wanted a font that was clear and easy to read and that would stand out against our background.


These were a few of our favourites;


















We trialed all of these fonts on our finished picture and chose the one that was clearest and we thought looked the best and suited the persona of the band.

Our final choice was 'Love Ya Like A Sister' as the title font which looked like this...

Next, we decided to use a completely different font for the album title text as we didnt want the cover to look bland, as its the most important element of a CD as its what the audience look at first and use to form an opinion on the band.
We used the 'Sasquatch' font that we previously found as the album title font as we thought it was jagged, bold and edgy. It turned out like this...

After figuring out our fonts we then put them on the picture we had edited for the cover

Digipak Front Cover - Editing the Photos

After looking through all the photos we took, we narrowed our choices down from the 60 photos to this particular one. This is the photograph we decided we would use for our front cover of the digipak as it looked like a good posing shot for a front cover and we all agreed it was the most suitable choice as it had space at the top, bottom and around the edges to fit in text for the band name etc.

We began the editing process by firstly using Adobe Fireworks to greyscale the background to make the colours of our outfits pop out more and we enhanced that even more by boosting the saturation and contrast. This is how the image turned out...

We were very happy with the way this looked so we carried on to cropping the photo to the appropriate size for the digipak.

After cropping it to 12 x 12cm we could then see where we could add in the text and where it would fit. We wanted to include the band name and album name and managed to fit these both at the top and bottom which is where we first intended to place them.

Original Photographs from Shoot

To ensure we could all be in the photos and get the best shots possible with the most ease, we asked another friend to come with us and be the photographer for us. We couldn't get access to a professional high quality camera so we just used a digital camera but with a high mega pixel. The photos still came out very clear and the fact we were editing them meant it didn't matter as much as we could change the sharpness to give better picture quality.
We headed to King Eddies beach in Tynemouth in the morning and achieved these shots...

We took about double this quantity of photographs but excluded many as they were unusable due to motion blur, imperfections or things like one of us having our eyes closed.
These were the photos we believed to be the best of the bunch that we could definitely potentially use for our Digipak and our magazine advertisement.