Digipak construction

All panels were created using Adobe Photoshop Elements 10.


Front panel (panel one)

  The first panel is comprised of a rotated image of the protagonist and assorted enlarged images of pills, the gun prop and the protagonist's face. The band and album names are written along the line of the protagonist's arm and pillow using a recent feature of Photoshop not seen in the school's version of the software, allowing text to be typed onto a self-drawn line. The 'cutout' filter was utilised to give the print effect and the colours were further simplified by filling the unwanted spaces with sampled colours elsewhere in the image. Due to issues with the complixity of the design, arranging the image and experimentation with the compositionr esulting in a favourable design, the original sketch of the front panel was scrapped.

Original sketch for panel one, from which the reversed figure is sourced

Example of the process of applying the cutout filter & filling unwanted areas of colour

Sampled photographs

Panel one

First inner panel (panel two)

Panel two is a rotated image of the upper area of the protagonist's bed, specifically the pillow, edited with the cutout filter and colour replacement. Over the pillow are several lyrics between quotation marks from the songs in the album varying in size and rotation, some of which are taken directly from Insomniac and others from my own lyrical ideas. One of the eye designs from panel three overlaps with this design. The original sketch of this panel inspired the use of the eyes in panel three and throughout the digipak.

Sampled photographs

Panel two

Second inner panel (panel three)

The background of this panel is a continuation of the bed covers from the previous panel. The eyes are edited from this favoured design sketch, though the text was moved to the centre of the panel and the idea of a shot of the protagonist at Elm Hill was scrapped due to difficulties with sustaining the level of quality after the cut-out filter is applied.

Sampled image

Panel three

Digipak spine

The spine uses the eye motif sampled from panel three and the same font (Lithos Pro) from elsewhere in the digipak design. The compact disc and EMI logos are sourced from Google Image searches, then edited to match the white and red of the text.

Example of the 'Lithos Pro' font

Sampled images

Spine

Back panel (panel four)

Panel four once again uses the same colours as elsewhere in the digipak. The image of the protagonist playing an acoustic guitar has been edited with the cutout filter and surrounded by a slightly rotated red rectangle. The stars were made in Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 using the five-pointed star from the 'stars and banners' section of shapes, coloured red and altered in the angle of the sides. The text in which the song names and legal information are written is Mangal, which was used to make the most important information for the consumer easily readable. The jagged beige shape surrounding the bonus tracks was cut out using the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop Elements 10. The barcode was sampled from a Google Images search and edited to remove the current code and include numbers chosen by myself.

Sampled images

Example of the process of creating the stars in Powerpoint

Example of the 'Mangal' font

Panel four

CD

The design for the CD was created by measuring an actual compact disc (from the Iron Maiden album for convenience) in width and height, then creating a new photoshop document in that measurement and filling the space with a coloured circle. A hole was made by deleting the apropriate space inside a smaller circle. The gun motif returns in an enlarged form, erased in a circular area around the centre to prevent unwanted overlapping. The record label, disc type and serial number have been reduced in size and arranged acroos the middll oothe CD. A smaller EMI logo of varied colour has also been added, with the word music to identify the specific section of the company (EMI Music). The custom path text is once again used for the album title, but the band name uses a regular horizontal format. One of the eye images also reappears to establish the logo/motif of the band. Around the centre of the CD is an edited shot of the lid of the pills in panel one.

Sampled photos & image

CD