Digipacks - Process

I started designing the digipack by finding a layout of a conventional digipack with 6 panels, as required by our brief, and brainstorming some ideas. I then began making.

I decided to present the digipacks on Powerpoint, but actually designed them on Photoshoo. Merging the overlapped photographs using the opacity tool was done on Powerpoint, and the photos themselves were collected and downloaded using iPhoto, however, structuring and doing the titles was all done on Photoshop. Although I was more comfortable using Powerpoint, the program limited what I could do vastly in comparison to Photoshop e.g. the Titles looked a lot more professional and editing pictures was a nightmare on even the simplest things such as getting rid of a white background on an image. I was also speaking to Sir regarding my use of Powerpoint over Photoshop, and he said that although it won't make me lose marks on the digipack, it will restrict how professional the product looks which won't help it achieve the highest marks possible.

As a result, I felt the decision was made. Sir gave me a quick 15 minute tutorial on how the basics of using Photoshop were done and I transferred the work done on Powerpoint over to Photoshop. It was fairly easy to use Photoshop once I gleaned the basics and I enjoyed doing it.

When it came to designing the logo for the Front Cover, the group pitched in. We'd established the main font being used for our digipack was Zapfino, and this would be the font her name and title of the album would be written in as a general convention of indie-pop artist digipacks is that the font is feminine and swirly, calligraphic. Interlocking the initials of Cara Smith, "CS" looked good, although we wanted to extend her last name as "Smith" seeing as it looked better, and we wanted the artist to be more personable, rather than a brand. It also looked a bit like a "G" so we extended her name and the result is "C Smith".

However, when I got Sir to have a look at front cover and give his opinion on it, he thought it looked too much like a brand and not personable enough for a twee-pop(ish) artist like Cara. He thought we should instead just have her name down the bottom spelling Cara May Smith. This was too long, though, and so we shortened it to Cara Smith. This worked out in a way because Kirsty, when designing the merchandise for the website had used the logo of the "C" and "S" intertwined, her initials making her name appear as Cara Smith. Re-branded as Cara Smith, we chose this as what our artist would be known as, even if there is a minor variation of her name on the website address e.g. http://kirstyanneheiss.wix.com/caramaysmith