Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary text?

To create the template for my album artwork, I used a website called Canva. Canva is a free graphic design tool that has many different templated and document formats that are available for people to use and manipulate into their own design. Canva had an already made template for a CD cover, which gave me the opportunity to then add my own images and features I wanted on my album cover, still keeping within the correct measurements. This helped me a lot as I didn’t have to measure out album covers myself which could result in inaccurate measurements.

 When deciding what my CD cover will look like and what I wanted to portray from it, I looked at the album artwork that M83 had created for their albums.

Most of their albums are very dark and have a strong image in the centre. The album artwork represents the style and genre of music that M83 create. The darkness and the prominent colour black that surrounds the covers gives the audience a sense of mystery around the images that are shown. Because the shadows and darkness are so prominent in the album covers, the main image in the middle of the covers stands out so much more. It intensifies the images and creates a contrast within the album cover which makes it more eye catching to the audience. I wanted to reflect this style in my album cover. I used a black background with a contrasting white polaroid photo frame, with images I took of my main characters in my music video. The white bordering my images really enhances them and sharpens them to catch the eye of the audience. The titles of the band and the album name are also in white and bold text to make them stand out from the black background. I also made sure to put the band name at the top of the cover, and the titles at the bottom, below the image. This is because on every album cover ‘M83’ is placed at the top of the image, and on most of the albums, the titles are shown at the bottom; I wanted to reflect this feature of their album artwork in my own. 

My magazine advert for the album shows a synergy between all the digipak artefacts. I have kept the same artistic style that I used in my album cover. Black and white being the main colour choices, with white font to make it stand out. I have used another image of the two main characters at the bottom of the advert, creating another link between that and the album cover. I have used the same fonts in the titles in both my album artwork and the magazine, I have chosen some that are similar to the fonts that M83 use in their albums, I have done this as I want to be able to reflect their genre of music. Gothic and bold fonts seem to suggest that the genre of music is quite electronic, and the added ‘gothic’ sense creates a very unique feel to the digipak, which is reflected in their individuality as music creators. I have also used the same style of font throughout my digipak and I have also used it in my music video to make sure there was a consistency between my main product and my ancillary products. I have included iTunes and Google play on my magazine advert due to them being some of the most popular ways that audiences download their music on. I have also included the price of the album on the advert as it is a universal price as it will cost the same however the audience decides to buy the album. Mute Records’ logo is also present on the magazine advert as this is a common convention within magazine adverts as it informs the audience to who is producing the artists songs. Another convention I have conformed to is putting reviews about the artist’s album on to the magazine, this will entice and persuade the audience to buy the album.

The back cover of my album shows all the common conventions of an album: a barcode, information about the band in very small text and the logo of Mute Records who produced and represent the band. I have also included the list of songs that will be featured on the album, and another image of my main characters, but with less serious faces. This is to give the message that is present throughout my music video that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. I believe that this part of my ancillary product is quite effective due to the fact that it creates an inferential link between the digipak and also the music video I created.