Digipak design ideas

These are my initial ideas for the digipak cover and inner panels, for an album by The Jubilees including the song Insomniac. They will feature the same character and themes as my video for the single.

The first design is a potential front cover. It will feature the protagonist in a surreal, upside-down mid shot, sleeping in his bed with the gun in hand. The image fades into an extreme close-up of the prescribed drugs and various pills. The theme of sleep is blatant and clearly linked back to the protagonist's drug problem. The gun is central in the image, as the contemplation of suicide and the climatic waking scene are key parts of the video's narrative.

The first inner page of the Digipak is planned to be an edited image of the protagonist walking through the city streets in the dead of night. The upper right section of the image will fade into black, with various eyes staring out. This surreal image touches upon the notion of looking and links back to the fixation on the protagonist's eyes in the video. I may take a photograph of the eyes in a hand-made collage/photo montage in the Dada style, or simply edit them into the picture. This page may feature song titles and/or legal information in the blank spaces.

The CD artwork will feature a similar fading background to the first panel, with a repeated, possibly monochrome image of the gun prop from the music video. The image will be edited as if it were a print, with most of the colour drained and replaced. This editing technique has been inspired by Andy Warhol's cover art for The Velvet Underground & Nico. A large alternative image of the gun will cover much of the CD. Around the hole in the centre of the CD will be a bird's eye shot of the pills, focusing on the corrugated lid. Behind the CD, on the second inner face of the Digipak, I have considered continuing the image of the eyes, fading from one page to another to connect the images together. The panel will also feature the rest of the gun image, overlapping with the CD and continuing the flowing design over the two inner panels.

The back cover to the Digipak was originally a choice between a simple, dark design on which the song titles and band information is displayed, or the opposite side to the container on the front panel. I decided that the latter would be too plain for a consumer to judge the merit of the product and instead elaborated on the more informative design. The top section will feature three to five star ratings, possibly with quotes from articles on the album, from magazines such as NME, Q and Rolling Stone, encouraging the readers of said magazines to purchase the acclaimed Digipak. The band and album names will be repeated and the song names will be listed underneath, possibly with the times at which the songs start on the CD. To the right of this information will be an image of the character from the video playing a musical instrument, specifically either an acoustic guitar or keyboard, to showcase the genre of the band through the instruments used and to market their live performances. Aside from the official song son the album itself, a handful of live songs will also be listed, presented as content from a venue such as Reading Festival. The space not already occupied by information and images will feature a motif similar in style to the other images in the Digipak to increase the visual appeal of the panel. Finally the record label's copyrights, dates and information will line the bottom of the panel, along with a bar code, price and record label logo. When picking up the Digipak to inspect in a shop, the audience will be able to decide whether they want to purchase the Digipak using the provided information.

The spine of the Digipak will also feature content from the rest of the panels, including band & album names, a motif (either of the eyes or an area of the front panel) and the record label. Using a plain, unlabelled design on the spine of the Digipak would hinder any opportunities to sell the product, as the DVD-sized packaging may be displayed from the side in a stack or shelf, therefore the product must be identifiable from this angle.