Digipak Analysis

Radiohead - OK Computer

The album cover uses a white background and black text so as to contrast each other, as well as making the colourful artwork stand out. The images used on the front cover are blurred and distorted, creating a sense of disorientation, reflecting the style of music and the context of the songs (for example "Paranoid Android"). The album's artwork is a collage of images and text, credited under the pseydonym "The White Chocolate Farm". The colour palette is predominantly white and blue, the result of "trying to make something the colour of bleached bone", according to Stanley Donwood, the creator. Visual motifs include motorways, aeroplanes, families, corporate logos and cityscapes. Phrases in the constructed language Esperanto and health-related instructions in both English and Greek appear in the booklet artwork, and the words "Lost Child" feature prominently on the cover. Several phrases bearing no relation to one another which appear throughout, and the white scribbles used as a way of correcting mistakes, suggest an irrational mind is behind the concepts. The title of the album itself is "to do with standing in a room where all these appliances are going off and all these machines and computers and so on ... and the sound it makes", once again illustrating the nonsensical theme running throughout. The liner notes contain the full lyrics which are arranged in shapes that resemble hidden images and are rendered with atypical syntax, alternate spelling and small annotations. The headers (the title of the album and the band's name) are placed underneath each other, in the top right hand corner of the cover. The title has been made bigger than the band's name, therefore insinuating that this is the most important piece of information.

The above image is a page from the CD booklet and features the motif of two stick figures shaking hands, which is also repeated twice in the artwork and once on the compact disc itself, and is emblematic of exploitation. The page also features white scribbles and text in Esperanto and English.

Other pages:

Radiohead are an experimental rock band and therefore, are not associated with the norm. From this we can assume that fans of the band will be attracted to the unforeseeable and will want to see the boundaries being pushed. This is reflected in the OK Computer album artwork, due to its abstract and surreal design, which will in turn attract the band's target audience to the album.
I would like to incorporate some of the blurred, distorted effects used in the OK Computer artwork into my own work, as well as using similar colours and similar styled images, as I think the bright blues contrast well with the white background and the black figures, creating a very psychedelic effect.