Researching Ancillary Products: Reviewing Last year's Student Products

During Friday 2^nd December lesson, I was given the task to look at examples of last years digipaks and advertisements to see how there ones fulfil the requirements of exactly how they should look like and hopefully be inspired by some to help with my own idea process. I looked through many digipaks and advertisements and saw a couple that I liked.

            

This digipak created b Holly Grant called ‘Coco Blue’, I really liked because of the visuals. I really like the theme of the colour blue and how it is consistent through the other panels. She made the colour blue look aesthetically pleasing to the eye then having it look too overpowering. She has followed the convention of most digipak covers where the artist is in the front cover. However, she has chosen to have the whole of the artist on the front cover instead of just having a close up which works really well because her costume complements the digipak and the background.

           

I like the font in the text because it is really clear even though she has used a calligraphy font that is sometimes hard to read but she has chosen one that is easy to read. I like the colour combination of the texts from blue to red because it gives a contrasting effect but doesn’t overpower the digipak but it does make it stand out. I do like the little cartoon images that she has used because it adds on to animated feel of the song and the digipak.

Her advertisement is consistent with her digipak, which works really well. The consistency with the same images of the artist and the same usage of he texts create a link between the digipak and advert to make them connected and not look entirely different like two different songs and artists. She has added the relevant information that normally goes onto an advertisement to promote the artist and the album/digipak. 

The second creation of a digipak and advertisement by last year’s student is called ‘Y. Shocker’. I really love this digipak because I think the front cover is absolutely amazing in promoting who the artist is. It clearly does this by illustrating the personality of the artist on the front cover through his facial expressions. There are three different images used to show the artist because it illustrates that there is more sides to him and shows a variety of different feelings on the digipak. The student has decided to go with the medium close up show conventionally because the whole point of the digipak is to promote the artist and his/her songs. I like the black and white effect used inside the panels because it creates questions of who the artist is which makes us want to know the answer which we can only find through buying the digipak to listen to the songs.

            

The advertisement is consistent with he digipak because they use the digipak in the advert and maintain the same type of text and colour theme. The simplicity of the advert is effective because it seems to fit nicely with the digipak and it works. 

The third creation of a digipak and advertisement by last year’s student is called ‘Melody Davies’. The only thing that I like abut this digipak are the images of he artist because they are photographed really well because they look professional and they clearly thought carefully about the stance that she should take to convey to the audience of how she is feeling. What  don like about this digipak is the font of the texts used because it is really hard to read and the colour for the fonts because they take its to overpowering and they don look good together with the images – it looks too overcrowded.

However, the advertisement seems to look better maybe because of the size of the advert. I like the consistency of the images and how thought out it is with how she is positioned. I like the illustration of the circles but again, the font and the colour used seems to be distracting and the positioning of the texts seems all over the place.