Digipak Planning/Concepts rough cut

My first priority when setting about creating my digipak was the main image of my album cover; should it be an icon? A picture of the artist? A vague picture of an object that relates to my artist? Regardless, at first, I knew that I needed something striking. I needed an image that would allow my album cover to stand out, if it were to sit on a store shelf. 

As the real Accidental Hero doesn't have a brand icon, I set about at imagining an image that would suit  my album's genre and intention. I sifted through my music video footage, looking for a moment that would make for an excellent screen shot. I came across this;

This is a screen shot of footage taken from the finalized version of my rough cut music video. I decided to keep the orange filter as the color grabs my attention. The foreground-background placement of the main artist and the strange devil character, respectively, indicates the importance of the artist at the while suggesting that the devil walks in his footsteps; a fitting notion, considering that the album's name will be "Thank God I Don't Believe In God" - a statement that some might argue is heretical and thereby ungodly in nature.

I began work on the first iterations of my album cover. At first, I thought about having black text with font similar to the original Accidental hero album cover:

I liked the placement of the artist name and title above the two actors, but I found my self wanting in terms of colour variety; I needed something to break the monotony.

The black boarders were only temporary at the time; I was aware that a CD case is relatively small - having a black boarder around the CD case would mean that my image would have to be even smaller, with its detail nearly indistinguishable at a glance (and that 'glance' is all my CD has to work on, if it were in a CD 

store).

The iteration above was created in power point. Of course, this is not the most elite of software for this kind image editing; I used it because the powerpoint software was quick at hand and easy to use, and I was still in the rough cut process, creating concepts and not actual digipak designs.

I started afresh with the same background image, this time with the intension of removing the black boarders on the top and bottom of my digipak cover, and with the thought of adding some offsetting colour:

Utilizing some of the editing tools available in photoshop, I created this image - a design that I thought was very close to my ideal finalized digipak front cover. When experimenting with filter options, I discovered a way of adding filter overlays in the form of 'graphics' that I could manipulate into defined shapes and various opacities; For one of my graphics, I created a small, purple rectangular block. I adjusted its opacity and changed the way it interacts with the background image. The result was a pinkish overlay that formed a kind of blue when over the dark clothing of the actor at the front, providing an ideal contrast in colour.

I used a similar method when adding the grey division behind the character at the front. The grey provided yet another break in colour, while also implying something deeper; the divide in colour originating from the guitarist suggests that there is a conflict in his character and that the orange, (one can argue it's his devil side) is winning over his personality as it takes over the majority of the image.

The text's font and its colour was amended under the concern for artist identity and image clarity; again, I needed to make sure that my artist's name and album title stood out from the vivid background.

With my final image coming together, I now started to consider the technicalities of creating a CD cover. The most pressing issue was size; all of the images above are too wide to fit in the dimensions of CD cover - my issue was the background image was too wide, and I had placed my title in a fashion that had made use of this room in width. I started again, saving and using the graphics and filters I had used before, to create a digipak front cover that was suited to the dimensions of standard CD casing: