Final Poster

 

For my final poster design I changed a few things. The main things is the text at the bottom and the sizing of the labels and the social media links.

Firstly I changed around the text. The "MC ZODIAC" text below the main title, I made smaller and I made it lowercase. I did this because I thought it was distracting to be the same characters of text and it looks better smaller, it doesn't take away from the main title whilst staying the same style.

I made the bottom text Happy Time which was also used on the album cover (for the back). This further links the poster to the digipak and I think it also looks better than the other fonts I have previously tried. It is very straight and 'chiseled', in white it contrasts nicely against the black background.

Finally I made the social media and label info much smaller, the reason for this is that this is a poster, meaning it will be large enough for the smaller images and text at the bottom to be easy to read. The font I used for the social media is small and thin (so people aren't straight away attracted to the corner because of a bold font) and modern which obviously links to the modern social media aspect.

Poster Draft 1

 
These are the first drafts of my poster, I wanted it to just be the album cover but with a slightly different presentation and of course it would need to fit in a portrait frame rather than a square.

I saved the album cover without any text on the front and put it on a black A4 canvas. I made sure to smooth out and erase some of the edges so they looks connected rather than just being the cover on a poster.

I put the album title at the top very large because it is the most important thing (the poster is for this particular album). The font I used was the same Old London font I used on the actual cover.
Below this I added the name of the artist in the same font, I thought it looked interesting with the text over the image so I added a bold drop shadow to make it legible.
I did something similar below with a few choices of fonts including the font I used but in lower case.

I made sure to add in the labels and social media links.

Final Digipak

For my final draft I have changed a lot of things. Firstly I have changed the discs for the CD and DVD, the reason I did this was to add colour to the otherwise mostly black and white design, and another reason is that it makes them more identifiable, if the art for the discs was just the skull illustration I had used previously, people may not recognize what album it matches to. The font I used for CD and DVD is the same as the back cover.

Next, another thing that I have edited is the back cover. I removed the numbers and replaced the text with a more interesting text which is slightly more stylized and italic. I have also added in the logo for the record label and copyright text. I think that no numbers look better than the design with the numbers because it looks cleaner and less cluttered and I think the new font is better even though it is very similar. 

Another small thing I have added is very faint black and red/brown images behind the drawn images I added. It is very subtle but it makes it slightly more interesting and a little bit of colour to an other wise black and grey square with other colourful frames.

Digipak Draft 3

In this draft of my digipak I started to build upon a digipak template. I first added in the front and back cover and then I added a border around it because the rest of the digipak is mostly black including the spine so it fits alongside it better. Before creating the spine, I changed the back cover so the text is larger and does not include a title. 

The Spine of the digipak is black with MC ZODIAC in the original old London that I used on the front cover. I also added lines to fill in the empty space, the lines are meant to look like border lines.

I added similar lines to the other spine. 

For the background of the other panels I drew a page with lots of dark, occult and satanic imagery (a candle, skull, goats head, reaper, pentagram, serpent and a pitchfork). I inverted the colours and added it to the black background, I also lowered the opacity so the drawing was a bit more subtle.

Feedback

The feedback I received for this draft was mostly to do with the text. I was recommended to change the font of the back cover to something slightly more interesting because it looks like a default font. I agree and will change it, although I do want it in a similar style, with serif, italic etc. I was also advised about the numbers on the tracklisting, I will try removing them just to see what it looks like even though I already like the numbers. Another piece of feedback I will consider is to add more colour, because other than the front and back covers, it is monochrome. I might experiment with different CD deisgns because they are very simple black and white and doesn't really fit with the messy, "all over the place" style.

Digipak Feedback

Digipak so far from charliemead

To show my digipak to my classmates I made a short presentation so I can easily show people how I have gotten to the point I am at and the different variations of my digipak so far.
Here is the feedback i have received.

In my feedback I found that most people prefer the colour version of my front cover. The thoughts on my fonts were very mixed although most people thought I should change the font for the back cover because it makes it look too much like the metal genre or a "tattoo style" font. I have decided to keep the front cover font but I will change the back cover font in the next iteration of my digipak.

Other than that, people commented that I need to create the other 4 panels of the digipak which I will do. I also need to make a poster which I will do and I will make it out of the front cover rather than creating a whole new image and adding the album cover to it.

Digipak: Draft 2

After changing my digipak I decided to make it mostly collage based so I collected lots of images I felt that fit the genre of Alternative Hip Hop and made an album cover.

After scanning in the image, I brightened it up a lot but also toned town the green because it was very bright and stood out too much. I created a few different variations including ones in colour, ones in black/white and ones in black and grey/red/green/purple.

For the text, instead of the Wishful Waves font I was originally going to use, I used a gothic type font called Old London. This links with the hip hop genre conventions because that style is used on my 90s hip hop albums such as Illmatic by Nas. The font also works as a horror type font so also fits in alot of themes in the experimental hip hop genre. I also tried out a large bold font. The reason I chose both of these fonts is because they are way easier to be read against the rough background especially the bold font, the Wishful Waves font is just an outline so is difficult to even see.

These are my favourite combinations of colours, typography and font placement.

I also created the back cover in a similar style but using only the Old London font.
These are my favourite colours for the back cover.

Digipak: First Draft

I started to make my digipak along my plans of using found images for it. For the front cover I used a small part of the painting "The Triumph of Death", made it black and white and adjusted the levels so it is only black and white, no grey. I also erased a portion of the image around some of the background/people to make space for the text. The image fits with the genre characteristics for alternative hip hop and lyrics used in the genre because it is dark and is about death, it features imagery of skeletons and death. Making the image dark and more simplistic makes it easier to see as well as fitting more in to the conventions of the genre by being darker.

For the title for the album I used my font choice which is Wishful Waves. is is distorted/wavy but also bold and fits the weird/aggressive genre. I tried red and purple which both work but I prefer the purple, I feel the red makes it look like another genre like punk or metal. The purple makes it look more mystical which fits the conventions. I made the type go in an arc to fit in the space and I also tried to stretch every letter to fill the gaps. I did this to emphasize the distorted features of the font and to fill in the gaps.

I have decided to progress by remaking the design of this (and the rest of the digipak) using cut out images and collaging them, this will take more effort but will make a more visually interesting image because my black and white cover could be too simple especially compared to album covers from other artists which often use more abstract images than just an image made black and white and slightly adjusted.