Digipak research

Through creating my digipak, I researched into minimalistic album covers and colour palettes. The following covers are the ones that I researched into and have looked in depth into the artists background and previous (if any) album covers they produced.

This album, LP1 is the debut album of English singer songwriter FKA twigs. It was released on 6 August 2014 by Young Turks. The album has spawned the singles "Two Weeks" and "Pendulum". On 10 September 2014, the album was announced as one of 12 albums shortlisted for the Mercury Prize for best British album of the year. Twigs self-released her music debut, EP1 on Bandcamp on 4 December 2012. Upon the release of AM on 9 September 2013, the album debuted at number 1 in the UK album charts, selling over 157,000 copies in its first week. As a result, Arctic Monkeys made history as the first independent label band with five consecutive number 1 albums in the UK. The album received widespread critical acclaim and brought Arctic Monkeys their third nomination for the Mercury Prize. The album also won the Brit award for Best British Album

The reason why this album stands out for me is because of the obscureness. I like the colour scheme and feel that the colour combination works really well. The pink/red colour on the face inspired me in the decision to use the pink colour on both my digipak and poster. The contrast between the duck-egg blue, the dark hair and the pale face makes the brightness of the red/pink face paint stand out. The colour combination itself works as seen in the album cover below by Thick Pigeon. I also like the way that her face doesn't look real, almost doll like. I think it adds to the manufactured look of the cover. It reminds me of dolls because of how unrealistic it has been made to look. 

On 26 February 2012, the Arctic Monkeys released a brand new song titled "R U Mine?" on their YouTube channel. On 4 March, it went to No. 23 on the UK Singles Chart on downloads alone. On 21 April, the song was released as a single, with the track "Electricity" as a B-side, released additionally for the Record Store Day. The song marked a direct shift in musical direction in comparison to their previous album, Suck It and See, by incorporating a heavy use of falsetto and hip hop beats, and eventually became the inspiration for AM. Upon the release of AM on 9 September 2013, the album debuted at number 1 in the UK album charts, selling over 157,000 copies in its first week. As a result, Arctic Monkeys made history as the first independent label band with five consecutive number 1 albums in the UK. The album received widespread critical acclaim and brought Arctic Monkeys their third nomination for the Mercury Prize. The album also won the Brit award for Best British Album. Alex Turner described AM as the band's "most original [album] yet," merging hip-hop drum beats with 70's heavy rock. The frontman has said that the song "Arabella" expresses the two styles of the album most effectively in one track. On AM, Turner continued to experiment with unusual lyrics, and the album includes the words from poem "I Wanna Be Yours" by John Cooper Clarke. Turner has stated that Homme's appearance on the song "Knee Socks" marks his favourite moment of the whole album.

The Arctic Monkeys have a very distinctive style when it comes to album covers. Their previous album covers are all very simplistic and have the same recognised logo in the top left hand corner. I like this album cover because of the simplicity of it and the contrast between the LP1 cover. I wanted to incorporate everything I researched into one. I thought if I incorporated the simplistic design of the Arctic Monkeys cover with a bright contrast colour I could create something different yet bold. 


I tried to look for obscure and different looking album covers and found the two covers below. Both covers stood out to me for more than one reason. 

The first cover, by Jamie XX stands out to me because of the chosen colour scheme. There are not many covers we see that use such a bold and daring colour scheme such as this one and as well as incorporating the minimalistic rectangle in the bottom left corner I feel like it challenges the usual conventions as we more often then not see minimalistic covers that are predominately black and white in colour. I wanted to create something that was bold and outstanding but something that kept to the simplistic idea similar to this. 

The above album by Goat stood out for me for similar reasons to the Jamie XX cover. Again I think the bold colour scheme makes the album stand out and would do against a plain CD stand background. I wanted to create something that I knew would grab my target audiences attention. The above album works really well for me because I think that the colour combination almost clashes making it more interesting to look at and more eye catching for the audience. The use of the two triangles add some uniqueness to the cover and the use of shapes is a rarity in the modern day era of graphic design as its all about the geometric and holographic patterns. 

After researching album after album I created a list of features I wanted on my digipak and advert. Some of which were the following:

• Simplistic colour scheme 
• Some kind of shape
• Minimal amount of text as possible
• A bold feature, possibly portrayed through colour