Digipak Creative Journey - Jay

Here is a storyboard of my journey taken of ideas and inspirations to come up with my front cover of my CD Digipak. Prior to this, we chose the song "The Hunter" by Slaves to create a music video to. Because of this, and the song title being "The Hunter" which indicates the idea of someone hunting people down and killing them. This gave me the idea of the film "The Purge",  which is a film I watched recently and included violence and scary characters in masks. I then thought of another film called American Psycho as it has relevance to the music video Time to Dance starring Jake Gyllenhaal. This is because it  pursues violent acts in the music video, which I thought of implementing into my music video as it will relate to the character in our video known as "The Hunter". This leads to the next few images, Jake Gyllenhaal in the Time to Dance music video is shown at the start to be wearing a fencing outfit which looked creepy in the video and is the type of image I want to  give off. This lead to the idea of  Dishonoured  which is a video game who features a villain character who uses a knife to kill people which links to weaponry in The Purge and American Pyshco. However this idea failed as I wanted a character to have how as I feel this makes them more mysterious. This lead me to another idea which was another video game known as Assassins Creed, where the main character pursues similar acts to previous ideas explained. But this time he has a hood which applies to the idea I want for my digipak front cover. I then researched more different hooded characters which I then found the TV show Arrow. I felt I needed to link it more to existing CD covers to see what the idea I have in mind looks like on an album cover. This is where I found the three album covers Testament, Prodigy and MF Doom covers. These ideas combined together for me to come up with my design. I liked the Prodigy text colour so I used Black and White and then I like the background colour on the MF Doom cover so I used this colour pallet idea and combined the hooded mask elements of my idea and that resulted in my album cover.

Digipak Journey Part 2 - Rayan

I haven't wrote about these pictures in my main Digipak journey post but here are some extra pictures that I had looked at in order to help me get an idea of what I wanted to be on the cover on my Digipak. I looked at creatures from Narnia and also I looked at the MGM logo and how they filmed their lion.

Digipak Journey - Rayan

First of all, I had searched the definition for the word 'hunter' because the main track on the album (and the song that we are recreating a music video for) is called 'The Hunter' and instead of having a person I wanted to have an animal which people/ or other animals would be scared of if they got hunted down by it.


I started looking at pictures of wolves, looking quite agitated. (1-3)


Next instead of just looking at wolves, I went into looking at wear wolves, which are more scary and have a bigger fear factor. (4-6)


The ideas of wolves and wear wolves went nowhere so I had to scrap that idea and start all over.


I was looking at other professional album covers and I came across one of the albums from Catfish and the Bottlemen, I really liked the idea of having a simple colour scheme and having a deadly animal in the centre on a black background. I had made up my mind that I wanted some type of deadly animal on my front cover in the centre. (7)


I started off with Hyenas and I came across the hyenas from Disney's Lion King, hyenas are vicious animals and they were a good animal to start off with, whilst also keeping in mind that I wanted my cover to look similar to The Catfish and the Bottlemen. (8)


Keeping with Disney, I started to look at the Beast from Beauty And The Beast, when the beast looks angry and annoyed, I also looked at images of the Beast from the live version of the film that will be released in 2017. (9-11)


The beast reminded me of mythical creatures so I searched for some mythical creatures so they gave me more ideas of what sort of animal I wanted on my cover. (12-13)


After looking at mythical creatures, I started looking at Greek mythical creatures and this is a vital point in my journey because this is where I came across to seeing lions, although they were Greek mythical creatures I felt that a lion would fit perfectly on my Digipak and Magazine Advert. (16-18)


I felt that a normal lion would suit very well and so I looked at various pictures of lions and although I saw a lot of good pictures, I felt that just the lions head would be perfect and this is where I decided that I wanted a lions head on my Digipak cover. (19-21)

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.