Friday 7 October 2016

Digipak Creative Journey - Max Sunnar


The idea started with the group's chosen song name 'The Hunter'.  From this name I thought that I could use something menacing such as predatory animal.

Instantly I thought of the Medallion from the video game Series 'The Witcher' (image 1). Although it was a good picture and idea, I felt it would be too hard to recreate/imitate on my digipak and I would end up with something that looked unprofessional.  However, the colour scheme of image 1 was extremely appealing to me and I felt that I could use it effectively.

I continued to think of things that has a similar colour scheme which I could gain ideas from. The first thing that I thought of was the American Psycho cover (image 2), which incorporated a white, black and red colour scheme.  I liked the fact this cover image used a limited amount of red, but it was effective. The red represented danger, violence and aggression which suited my vision well. I continued to look at other movies that adopted a similar colour scheme, in which case I found the cover for the movie Seven (image 3).

In addition to the Blu-Ray cover for the film, the poster (image 4) was very inspirational to the creation of my digipak. It involves a tattered, old and creepy look which I liked very much. Immediately, I knew that I would try to adopt this style onto my design.

From Image 4, the development from this poster went nowhere and therefore I had to find something else to take inspirations from.

Image 5 is the cover of Robert Graysmith's novel, Zodiac. It is one of my favourite books and just happened to follow a similar colour scheme to previous images. However, this was not the reason I looked to this book for inspiration.  The old aspect that was found from the Seven poster (Image 4) was something that I wanted to emphasise more research onto. In the novel/ movie a frequent occurrence of mysterious symbols (Image 7) is relevant throughout. This gave me the idea of having similar symbols being at the forefront of my digipak.

This idea was scrapped as I wanted something that could relate to the album/song name to be present on my design.

After looking at Zodiac, I remembered a film called Prisoners (images 8-9), which similarly to Zodiac, stared actor, Jake Gyllenhaal. Prisoners is a movie which, like Zodiac has a mysterious feel to it. Once looking into Prisoners, I saw a frequent theme of mazes occurring. The use of mazes interested me and looked very appealing on the cover and poster for the movie.  When thinking about mazes in movies while looking at Prisoners I also thought of the movie Inception (Image 10). 

Before going any further, I decided to research into mazes further to see if I could link them with my album in any way. I came across the Greek Mythological Story called the Labyrinth (Images 11-13).  In this story, The Labyrinth, an elaborate structure designed and built by legendary artificer Daedalus for King Minos Its function was to hold the Minotaur (Image 14) eventually hunted down in the maze by the hero, Theseus.  I felt this was a good use of symbolism to compare the characters in the mythological tale and the album. 

Image 15 is first practice attempt that I created to see if using the maze would look good on at final piece and the main aspect of my digipak. Along with this I began searching for more album covers that used a maze as their main feature. First I found a Pink Floyd album -Labyrinth which provided a square maze look. I felt this looked better on an album than the circular one that I had created and decided that I would use a square maze rather than the circular ones that I had researched prior. 

I then found a greatest hit by Maze ft. Frankie Beverly cover (Image 17) which used bordered of the maze aspect into the middle of the page, and left whitespace free on the outside. This look appealed to me greatly and reminded me of a number of modern day albums that have include this style of artwork on their albums also (images 18-22). 

After looking at different albums that's artwork was minimized into the middle of the design, I decided that this would be something that could be used on my digipak.

Image 22 is an album cover that I used when analysing a number of various digipaks. The gold border on this design is something that I liked. I thought that a mixture of worn out and neat aspects could complement the digipak nicely. It's border also helps the artwork it holds stand out far more effectively.

After the substantial research that I completed, I was able to implement a number of various ideas from parts of them to create my digipak design (Image 23).  The design includes the maze elements I researched thoroughly (Images 8-17) as well as the attractive and violent colour scheme of Black and red (Images 1-6).  My design also confines its primary artwork in the centre of the page and uses a red border around it, making the artwork look more appealing and stand out.  I also used the idea of implementing a worn, old and mysterious look and feel to my design (Images 3,4,7,18,19,20), by adding noise and scratches to my digipak.






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