Magazine Advert Production

Magazine Advert 1 Production on Prezi

Magazine Advert 2 Production on Prezi

Magazine Advert Research and Planning

Whilst working on the digipak, we began to plan the magazine advertisement that was the remaining ancillary task. It is important to link all three of our products so by planning the digipak and advert together we could achieve this. First we looked at some current adverts found in some music magazines. We chose to look at the magazines that featured in Q magazine and how these were laid out following the post about our target audience, which you can see here.

 After looking at these adverts, I began to plan what our magazine advert could look like after taking inspiration from these adverts and narrowing down the images I could use. Based on some of the pictures from our recording and the digipak ideas, I came up with these ideas:

The majority of magazine advertisements are simple and are designed to draw attention to key things such as who the album artist is, when it will be released and the reviews of the album. They commonly feature a large image of either the band or singer to establish their identity. The advert for the album by Elton John and Leon Russell is an example of the simple layout and colour scheme used in adverts and I have circled parts of the image that will need to be included on our advert.

For my first idea, I thought about using a similar colour scheme to this advert and a similar layout, with an image of the band in the centre and the information above and below this. The key things in the image are written in the largest font.

For the second idea I took more ideas from the Bob Dylan advert as this featured an image of a single person like I was using. I thought this idea could work if I similarly featured a picture of the album on the advert, as this would establish the band as a whole despite the lead singer being the only one to feature on the advert. I used a similar structure to this advert when designing my own and also highlighted some other features of the advert I could include.

The aspects that also need to be included are the website name so that people interested can go to the band's website and the HMV logo which can show where to buy the album from. 

For both our digipak and advert, we needed the logo's of the companies associated with One Republic to feature on the products. After some research, we found that One Republic's record labels were Mosley Music Group and Interscope Records, both of which are owned by Universal Music Group. We found the logo's of these and featured them on our advert and digipak.

Digipak Creation

Digipak Creation from Jamie WGSB on Vimeo.

Further Digipak Research and Ideas

These are some small designs that we could possibly use for our digipak. We took the idea of using different colours for 'One Republic' and 'Letting Go' from existing One Republic digipaks and also thought the tiled effect used in the top right hand corner could be used as a pattern on the back cover and inside cover, as it resembles a stained glass window.

One Republic - Digipak Logo's and Styles

Elliot began looking at the existing One Republic digipaks and whether they had any similarities. Each of the albums have a different font used on the front covers, as you can see from the image on the left. The albums also do not display a band logo allowing us a freedom when designing our own digipak. Despite this, there are many similarities between the fonts, as they all use black, white and browns as a distinct colour scheme. The fonts are all formal which reflects the band as a whole, as throughout their music videos they are seen wearing formal clothing. This style further promotes the band's image. In some cases, the same fonts are used for both the name of the band and the album title, but the difference is indicated by a change of colour.

The album artwork is generally abstract as you can see in the image on the right. 'Waking Up' uses paint splatters as an album artwork, and 'Dreaming Out Loud' uses a silhouette of a tree on a blue starry background. This album cover is the only one that appears to have some relevance to the title of the album, as dreaming is commonly associated with stars and night.

'Apologize' is one album cover that shows the band as a whole, where you can see they are dressed formally and the structure of the image gives an indication of the members of the band. The lead singer is presented at the front, and the remaining band members are situated behind him, showing his importance and role in the band. If we use an image of our band as a whole we would need to pay attention to how we set up the image like this.

Digipak Research - Alternative Rock Genre

I began some research into the general conventions of digipaks in the alternative rock genre and found some patterns in the way album covers are presented. If the album covers show the band, they usually depict the lead singer at the front of the image. The rest of the band members are behind the lead singer in a photo. The lead singer appears as the front face of the band and is often the most recognised member of the band, so putting them at the forefront of the photo makes the band more recognisable.

From the image of the Stereophonics album cover and the Razorlight cover you can see that both lead singers are at the front of the band members and both are looking out of the image at you. The other band members are looking away or appear less engaged with the viewer. This highlights importance of the lead singer and also allows people to understand the roles of the people in the picture without necessarily knowing who is who.

However I found with the majority of alternative rock digipaks that they often display abstract art or computer generated images. We had already found that the majority of One Republic's album covers feature art rather than an image of the band and this research showed that this was common for the whole genre. The image on the right is an example of the different kinds of album art within the genre, with many posing no specific relevance the title of the album or the name of the band.

Photoshop Fire Effect

This is a small project I completed myself using photoshop. I took the original image on the right and

using fire effects and the warp tool to make a fire image. This helped me understand more tools in

photoshop and can come in useful when looking at making a CD cover or magazine advert.