G324 Alex Preston: Final Digipak Construction

How the Digipak was formed

This was the initial template I acquired for the digipak:

Designing and Customising the Background

From here, I added a gritty paper background to add to the idea of having a dated diary fused in with the background.

As the theme we were going for was Zen related, incorporating peace an tranquility - juxtaposed to the situation, I gathered a photo of a zen leaf. As the original image had a blue background, and blue was strongly present in the leafs, I used the colour correction and colour replace tools, to replace the blue, with brown, to blend well with the background. Also, as the background around the leaf was different compared to the main background, I used the clone stamp to replicate the texture of the background, along with the spot-healing tool to blend the edges of the two textures. I then lowered the opacity to 30%, so it simply blends into the background.

Another image I acquired was similar to the image on the right. As I wanted the image to use only half the total height of the digipak, but 100% of the height, I cropped off a section of the sun. This section was then resized to make the most of the space available, whilst retaining the aspect ratio. Any parts that overlapped onto the other side of the Digipak were simply cut off.

As I realised that the Zen leaf overlapped on the sides and creases, I just chopped off the remaining excess of the image

The end result for this section is shown above

Customising the Back Panel

The first element added to the back panel was the track list. To create this, I decided to use the font, Monotype Corsiva. I chose this font as I found that it had an angelic appearance to it, which would well-suit the character of 'Jane'. I then applied an outer glow and drop shadow to the text, to add depth.

I then added a QR code to the digipak, due to the amount of digipaks which feature them. To do this, I went onto a QR generator site (qrstuff.com), entered in the Facebook URL for our band, and downloaded the image. I then removed the white elements, making it transparent, and added it to the back panel. To our amazement; even without any solid colour background, the QR code still worked correctly, even when we printed it off.

Next, I added a barcode. I did want to get an authentic and custom barcode, but after seeing that it would not be free, I decided not to. Instead, I simply found an image of a barcode on the Internet, and added it to the back panel.

Finally, for this panel, I added the necessary copyright information required, and commonly featured on a digipak. This information included details of the record company, distribution company, and licence terms of use within the European Union.

This is a screenshot of how the back panel looks, amongst the other elements.

Customising the CD Panel

To get this image of a disc retainer, I just acquired another, more generic, CD template, and copied the Photoshop layer. I chose to copy the layer as this would retain the most quality.

This is a screenshot of how the CD panel looks, amongst the other elements.

Customising the Front Panel

Initially, I added in the band's title. To do this, I typed out the band's title, using the same font settings as the Advert, Poster, and Post-Production, which included the font family, Bernard MT Condensed, along with the same spacing between the two rows. I then added an outer glow to emphasise the gap in colour between the font's colour, and the digipak's background, thus helping to make the text stand out.

Next, I added the text for "Diary of Jane". To do this, I used a font named "Honey Script", due to it's curvaceous form, and feminine appearance - which in a nutshell represents "Jane"

This is a screenshot of how the front panel looks, amongst the other elements.

Customising the Polaroid Photos Panel

As I wanted the Digipak to look and feel like a diary, I decided to add some photos depicting "Jane" and "Ben", representing the love between the two. In regards to how I made this panel, I first started by gathering a Photoshop Template of a Polaroid Photo. From here, in the cases of the behind photos, I simply added the photo on the appropriate layer, cropped the image, and merged the layers to add on to the Digipak document. With the front image however, I took a photo of "Jane" and "Ben", and tweaked it in Photoshop. The main tweak was cutting "Jane" out onto another layer, and filling in her original position. From here, I used the Shadows and Highlights Option to emphasise the couple.