Digipak AnalysisPatrick Smith

Front Cover - The front cover to this digipak is interesting as there is no text present telling you the artist or even the album's name. This minimalistic nature of the cover could be seen in two ways, the first being that it adds to a slick and stylistic aesthetic motif that runs throughout the interior of the digipak. However on the other hand this stylistic approach makes it hard for the consumer to identify the product in a physical environment, due to the band and album name being located on the back on the packaging. Back Cover - The aforementioned band and album name are located prominently at the top of the rear cover with the band’s name being larger as well as a different colour to the album name to differentiate the two. Below that we can see the track listings which is using the same font colour to the album name, this creates a nice cohesiveness and streamlines the information.

Interior - The interior focuses on the same scene from the front cover from a closer angle, I think that this sense of consistency works well as it is less jarring than if the imagery was different from the cover. Keeping the artwork throughout the digipak is something I strongly feel we should use as to me it creates a really slick and high quality looking package.

Disc - The disc itself shows the band’s name in bold with the album name underneath. Again like the front cover the disc is very minimalistic with an unusual pattern printed onto the disc itself, I think overall the look of the disc even though it does not follow the same imagery as the rest of the digipak does look aesthetically nice and high quality like the rest of the package. Although having said this to some people it may feel out of place compared to the rest of the package, this is something to consider when making the decision for our own disc artwork.

Booklet - The booklet included is printed on a reasonably high quality glossy paper and offers a mixture of images of the band and lyrics for the songs present on the album. This layout would be ideal for our own digipak as two of the most requested content items were lyrics and images of the band so combining the two into one would satisfy both.

Unlike the previous Digipak example the band’s name is featured in the upper left corner of the cover, this makes the product easier to identify, however the name of the album (Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not) is not visible unless you look at the spine or at the back of the product. I still believe that it is in our best interests to boldly assert the album and band’s name on the cover of our Digipak to make sure that consumers can identify it within a retail environment.

I do like the idea of including an inkeeping theme that flows from the cover to the disc artwork, like the image above of a man smoking followed by the disc artwork that features lots of cigarette buds as it makes the product feel cohesive and well thought out . I feel that we could instead of this concept feature pictures/pull screens from our music video in an attempt to create a sense of synergy between the primary and ancillary products

I found that digipaks are a fairly modern product (early 2000s), so with our chosen song and album being from the 1990s I couldn't find any examples of re-released material in this packaging format. Instead I looked at band’s album covers that share the same genre of Britpop as our own chosen band Pulp, including the original album artwork (top left) used for the album we wish to re-release as a digipak. As you can see from the covers above there are no real recurring themes when it comes to what is featured within the cover images, so in that sense we have a great deal of creative freedom that should allow us to create something new and fresh. However unlike the previously analysed digipaks the band and album's name is prominently placed somewhere on product's cover (I think we should follow this convention, reference previous slides for reasons), there doesn't however seem to be a set location in terms of placement so again this gives us freedom to experiment during the planning stages, as their are no real convention within the products of our genre to follow.