DigiPak - Development

Having experimented with Adobe Illustrator and having carefully considered about the way in which I wanted to design my DigiPak, it was time to actually get to work and create it. 

The first thing I did was to email myself the Capricorn icon that I designed on my iPad's Sketches app. This allowed me to access it from the school's MacBook, where I opened the image in Illustrator, so that I could trace the image and turn it into a vector, allowing me to easily resize and recolour it.

Once this had been done, I removed its white background. 

I then selected a digital photograph I'd taken of Ilkley river and opened it in Illustrator, where I changed the colour of the Capricorn icon to white and placed it over the top. 

However, right away I realised that the two were rather incongruous to one another. Given the softness in the design of the Capricorn logo, I decided to experiment with the photograph. Using the Waterlogue app, I was able to see it in a watercolour style; I was very pleased with the result, and have used it as the back ground for both the front and back cover of the DigiPak. 

To fit the image to the DigiPak, I used the shape tool to create a rectangle shape measured from the outer lines, resized the image to fit the rectangle as best as possible while holding down the shift key, and then selected it all and made a clipping mask, which I was able to place over the front/back cover.

Initially, I tried it with the water colour image and Capricorn icon only being on the front cover. However, the effect of this was that the back cover felt like an entirely separate entity. Due to this, I decided to use the image the whole way across the DigiPak's front and back cover, as it made it feel connected.  

I'd already created the track listings, the legal jargon, the barcode and the Island Records logo in my rough draft of a DigiPak, so I reused them. The only changes made were a slight shift in formatting (although not to a noticeable degree), and the different font. While I had considered a few alternate fonts, the one that won out was Trattatello, as it was the one that simultaneously looked the most professional and yet still maintained that 'human element' to it (it looks like it could be handwriting.) 

For the inside of the DigiPak I wanted to create the effect of it as being almost like a diary or journal of sorts, which relates to the theme of memories explored within my music video. It also presented me with the opportunity to take some polaroid photography; I took pictures different things that I felt were related to the music video (such as the subject herself), scanned them into the computer, and digitally placed them over the parchment paper background that I created. 

To create the parchment paper background without reducing the quality of the image I doubled the image and reflected it, giving it the appearance of being one long image that I was then able to make a clipping mask out of.

As I'm producing this as a self-titled album, I placed Briggs' name in the centre of the spine, in a white print so that it would stand out against the dark coloured background.

Once I had placed the background my next job was to fill it in, which I did using the Polaroid photos I had taken; the subjects of each photograph relate to the music video. I scanned the polaroids into the computer and then opened them in Illustrator. I decided that instead of flipping each image individually, I would instead arrange the images, make a clipping mask to ensure that they fit to the inner panel, and then group and flip it all. 

(The distorted lines around the edge of the photographs will disappear after the document is exported.) 

At this point I felt I was done, so I asked my classmates and teacher for some informal feedback on what they thought of it; this was when my teacher raised the point - that was quickly agreed upon by my peers - that the inside cover (behind where the CD would be placed) felt too empty. This lead me to the idea of placing the Capricorn logo on the inside as well, except I changed it up this time. I decided to decrease the opacity and make the colour white, so that it looked like a watermark and fit with the papyrus paper background. 

With this, the DigiPak was complete!

It follows the necessary codes and conventions of a DigiPak, it's fitting to the genre, it contains iconography for the artist and links to the video and the magazine advert.