Digipak Initial Research

Before Fran started her own personal work on getting the Digipak made, we researched a few existing digipaks from the indie-pop genre as a group. In particular, we initially focused on the same three artists we had done our conventions of the indie-pop genre research on:

From these broad searches we distinguished a mere few digipaks which caught our eye:

The black and white aspect to the album covers made them aesthetically pleasing, and each option allowed us to consider a different way of approaching the digipak for our artist, SIOUX. 

For instance, the top-left album cover showed a lot of bling and meticulous detail which we thought would be something to play around with for our artist. We liked how it made use of the actual artist but failed to show her in enough detail to be overtly recognisable. The artists' trademark name in a elaborate little symbol was something we also enjoyed. However, given how our digipak is for a new artist, we realised the importance in having her face visible as to establish her star image.

Consequently, whilst the top-right is very pleasing visually and would possibly fit our artist, we similarly have to go down a different route as we need to show our artists' image for potential fans to become familiar with her. However, we did enjoy the handwritten quality to the album cover's artist and name.

Given the importance of star image, the bottom-left cover is the most applicable to what we want to achieve. It shows the artist and gives an idea about what she's about: originality, eccentricity. Likewise, it has a handwritten and almost homemade quality which we really enjoy. Realistically, of the four, this is the one we will take the most inspiration from.

The bottom-right isn't something we want to replicate, but was something to consider: keeping the digipak simple, yet effective.

Doing a final sweep of our searches, we also found these above two qualities which we want to consider playing around with. Firstly, golden 'tinfoil' writing with a black and white photo as well as the previously mentioned handwritten quality which we liked so much.

After the lesson, I also did some research of my own, specifically that of solo female artists and came up with a design idea for the digipak, playing upon the notion that SIOUX means "little snakes" regarding her snake-skin costume:

The idea behind my suggestion was that we combined the most liked aspects of each researched album cover and combined them together. I suggested we used a colour album cover given how bright our video is. 

Equally, Hannah also did some research of her own, scouring through Pinterest in order to find some artistic inspiration based off of SIOUX's name. Generally, these focused on an interesting symbol or picture (not of our artist) as a possible digipak front cover:

Fran will now go away and do some more research on her own before we regather as a group and decide as to which route we are definitely going to progress down.