Ancillary: Text and Colours

When I first started my digipack, I wasn't sure whether to use  one font to have a sense of simplicity or have two fonts for some variation within the whole digipack. After my initial research and going back to my inspirations, I looked at the variation in texts that the digipacks used, and the one that stood out to me the most was from Gabrielle Aplin, who uses two fonts that work really well together. The artists name really stands out from the whole front cover as it is clearly the most dominant aspect as opposed to the album name which is clearly smaller yet holds it's own significance due to the difference in font. The calligraphic type of text really captures the femininity of the artists, and it the same colour of the artist name which highlights their link to each other. The font type was carried in the back cover of the digipack where the colours of the text was also the same. Another thing that I really admired about the digipack is the placement of the text itself, especially for the back cover where everything from the track-list to the  barcode was centred. The use of colours in this digipack is exceptionally well in my eyes as it contain a sense of simplicity and doesn't overdo it, the use of black font for the track lists and the white for the labels, barcode and copyright information set them apart from each other, which goes to show that the smaller things in life have a bigger impact.

The Outcome

Century Gothic, Ostrich and Popsies

Once I had a look at the digipack above, I wanted to take a lot of aspects into my own digipack as I thought the taste and simplicity of the digipack was well executed and is something that I wanted to do myself. When I first started, my digipack only had one type of font that was used consistently throughout the whole digipack, but after researching I though it would be best to have another font so there is some variation, and more versatility for me to experiment. I kept the artists name in lowercase and the largest thing on the front cover as I thought it would make it unique and more noticeable to the other things on the cover. The font I used at first was "Century Gothic", and at the time it looked good but went on to look bland and repetitive so I chose another font which is similar to Gabrielle Aplins and thought it worked well, and the font was "Popsies". However, I also saw another font that caught my eye, and this font was "Ostrich" which worked really well with the artist names which is uniquely "Century Gothic". This essentially became a problem as I wasn't sure whether to use "Popsies" or "Ostrich", so I decided to ask which one people preferred and most said they preferred the "Ostrich" font.

Back-cover w/ centred text and info.

Once I worked out the fonts I wanted to use, the "Century Gothic" for the artist name and "Ostrich" for the album name, I thought it would be best to have the colours of the text the same throughout and I decided to go for white as I thought it would stand it stand out from the background its  placed on. The colour white was also taken into the information that is found at the bottom of the back cover and essentially became a sort of motif that is apparent in all my ancillary products. Just like Gabrielle Aplin, I took the idea of having everything of the back cover centred and it worked just as well as I thought it would. By doing this and maintaining the colour white, the whole digipack had a good sense of continuity and flow.  For the spine of the digipack, I made the background black so I could still use the white text, and it worked well as it set a distinction between both the front and back cover, yet it still maintained the flow through the continuous white text.

Layout for the advert text

After I finished the front and back cover of my digipack, I moved onto my advertisement, which has similar aspects to the text and colours of my digipack. The advert itself has a similar colours scheme of the black and white, with the black coming from the gradient in which is placed at the bottom of the advert and the text is white, placed above the black gradient. I used the same combination of font which is the "Century Gothic" and "Ostrich", adding some synergy to the digipack and advert. Like my digipack, I kept the artists name in "Century Gothic" with everything else in "Ostrich". After doing some initial research, I wasn't sure how to approach the layout, but once I tried various ideas, I decided to make everything a lot more compact and centred around the the artist name, so there is more significance on selling the artist. I think this advert was the best one out of all the adverts I attempted at making, with most being discarded or me just giving up, but let's save that for another blog.