Digipak Design

Whilst designing my Digipak, I decided that it would be a good idea to use stills from some of the previous footage I had shot, and planned to manipulate my "tropical fish" idea into the making of the digipak as well as my music video. The fish reflect elements of surf rock and are also relevant to my album single "Where Is My Mind?". Also, the effects I used on my iPhone during filming made the footage look abstract and would add a psychedelic element to my work without much further editing.

First of all, I took a screen shot of the still I wanted to work with and pasted it into a Microsoft Word document and saved it as an image.

                                     

 I then opened the image in Paint and cropped it down. 

Having done this, the image was then ready to be placed into Photoshop.

(Before I did so, I imported a 4 panel digipak template so as to make the designing process much easier.)

I then did the same for the back cover.

After that, I began adding details to the back cover, starting with the tracklistings.

I then pasted a barcode onto the cover (this particular barcode I found had been used on several of the Pixies' albums).

I added two final details, and wrote "Produced and mixed by Gil Norton", who produced several of the Pixies' albums...

...and then added the "4AD" logo, symbolising the British independent record label, to create a sense of professionalism and realism about my work.

4AD sign alternative rock, indie rock and post-punk bands to their label, such as Pixies, The Breeders and Throwing Muses, and are therefore perfectly associated with "Electric Addiction".

I then filled in the spine of the cover,

and added the album title and band name to it; "Electric Addiction - "Pipeline Pop Jet".

I wanted to use four different fish in my artwork, and so took stills from different sections of my footage. I didn't like the colours used when I cropped this image of a clown fish, however, and so decided to edit this on Photoshop.

I played around with the hue/saturation, and changed the colour balance/exposure etc. until I was happy with the result.

I decided on a bright green background, in keeping with the colour scheme of the two other images, and blended the lighter colours in the image to counter-balance the black, as I felt that this created a more psychedelic look.

I then did the same with a final image, although keeping a bit of black within the colour scheme this time to make the fish stand out against the light background.

And this is the final result!