Album Artwork and Digipak

The next stage of the process, after having finished editing the music video, is to create the album artwork for the song. The band, who I have chosen to be called Shrouded Violet for reasons previously explained, is mainly focused on its singer who is featured heavily in the video. She is the one who writes the songs and although it is technically a band, the songs are all about her life and her feelings about having children and whether or not to continue making music. The name of the song, I'm Not Done, clearly denotes that her time in the music industry is not yet over and she wants to continue making music. From the lyrics however it is not particularly obvious that this is what the song is about. The lyrics are more akin to that of some kind of fever dream or distorted reality, which fits hand in hand with the music and what kind of environment the writer was in when she wrote them.

With this in mind, I decided that the artwork would need to in some way represent the meaning behind the song and the thoughts of the writer. I started off by taking one of the stills from the video. I chose to take one from when she was running through the woods so I could contrast the singer with the woods behind her.
I started with the image below:

After choosing this particular frame I had to make it fit to the correct size, so I cropped out the left side of the image so it looked like this:

I then used the lasso tool to duplicate her head and put it on a new layer so that it could be independently edited. I darkened her face as a whole to add a more serious tone and acknowledge that the themes in the song are to be taken seriously. I then made the background black and white to give more contrast between the trees and her face. I also added an effect to her face which gave her a slightly blurry look to connote that she is not clearly defined by anyone or anything and she won't do what may be expected of her.

After this I needed to add the name of the band and the name of the single. I thought that this needed to be fairly simple and understated, so I chose a font that resembled a typewriter, Courier New, and positioned the artist name in the top third of the picture and the album name below and slightly to the right.

Happy with the album cover I decided to choose pictures for the back of the digipak and the inside. I chose a picture of a fur tree I took while filming to go inside the digipak and a picture of a clearing in the woods with a tree in the middle for the back cover.

For the picture of the fur tree that was to go inside the digipak, I wanted to the give the picture a gloomier look, so I made the white cloud behind the trees darker to a more grey colour and turned down the brightness of the picture as a whole. I decided not to put lyrics on this inside picture because it is not really a song which you would sing along to at a gig/concert. By this I am essentially saying that it is not the genre of music to have lyrics in the digipak. If it were a full album then there could be a booklet with the lyrics inside, but with the lyrics being easily available online to those who want them there is not much point as it would be an unnecessary expense.

With the picture for the back of the digipak I decided to use the tree trunk as a place to place the names of the songs on the CD. This did mean that I had to resize the image so that a significant portion of the picture was taken up by the trunk. To do this I had to remove parts of the original image and make a section larger, reducing the quality, which is not ideal but it isn't too noticeable. Continuing with the theme of contrasting I decided to use a similar technique to the one I used for the front cover, which was to select the tree trunk and copy it onto a new layer so that it could be different to the scenery behind it. I chose to make the scenery black and white and also give it a filter, which makes it look slightly out of focus and blurry like the background in the front cover image. I made the tree trunk greener and more saturated to give a greater contrast as the original picture had less vibrant colours. As this is a single rather than an album and there are only a few songs - the single itself, a remix of the single and two other B-sides.

Below are five back cover images with different text styles.
I asked a sample of the target age range (15 ~ 40) which design they preferred.

The most popular design was the last one.
Here are some comments regarding the different designs:

"The first design has an interesting effect - it looks as though the words are coming out of the tree, but it does not really fit with the rest of the image and the genre of the music."

"If you look closely at the second design it looks like the words could have been carved in to the tree, but from a distance, where most people would see it, you can't notice this and it gives the words a white glow which makes them slightly harder to read."

"I like that the third design looks fairly understated, but it makes it harder to read, which is not ideal."

"The text in the fourth picture is not particularly aesthetically pleasing as the yellow glow is out of place and doesn't really add to the effect."

"The fifth design is both understated - like the front cover - and fairly simple to read, although there is a mark on the tree near the 'u' in Gui, which might make it hard to read that word. It could do with being a bit clearer and it also needs some copyright information somewhere (probably underneath the barcode)."

I acted on the last comment and made the text slightly clearer and added some copyright information in the bottom right corner.

After the back cover there was one more image that was needed to complete the digipak. I decided to take another still from the music video, this time from a shot through the tops of trees.

I decided not to alter this image too much as it already showed a contrast of colour between the sky and the woods. I turned down the intensity of the blue in the sky a little and increased the brightness a small amount.

After this final panel I put them together into the digipak format. down the middle there is a spine, which I decided to fill with black and the name of the artist and single between the front and back panels. The same font was used to give some continuity to the digipak.

This is the template design for a digipak from a manufacturer's website and below it you can see the final digipak design in the same layout.