Digipak and Website Evaluation Task 1
- 2. FRONT COVER In our digipak 'Hallucinations', we used a mid shot of the artist striking a powerful and confident pose. Her position presents our artist to be a synthetic image, selling her sex appeal to audiences. This is likewise seen on Mariah Carey’s album ‘The emancipation of mimi’, who poses a similar position of dominance. However, they used a long shot to display to full figure of the artist, creating her sex appeal. On the other hand, Rihanna’s ‘Loud’ uses a close up of Rihanna with her eyes close. This is a very exposing and personal technical convention, which connects her to her audience. She is presenting herself to be ordinary and human, suggesting that the album is very close and vulnerable to her. We chose to combine these technical conventions as although we wanted to show off the artist’s star image for sales, we also wanted her to connect to the fans. We felt with a closer shot, she presents herself as more ordinary and intimate. This highlights Dyer’s Star Theory Paradox that she is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.
- 3. FRONT COVER We used a black background against a gold tint to present our artist as mysterious and glowing. The gold tint stays truer to her skin tone than that of Rihanna’s cover, that’s filtered with a red tint. The golden glow disguises our artist’s blemishes to make her look more flawless. This enhances her synthetic image and displays her star image as confident and extraordinary. These conventions are exactly seen in Mariah Carey’s album, who’s blemishes have been removed to show perfection. We used a golden classic font for our album title ‘Hallcuinations’. The gold texture matched the glow of the artist, and presented her to be defying. This is in contrast to Rihanna’s title, which is a thin and clean white font. This is a more subtle and intimate style that doesn’t overwhelm the audience. (However, we did use this font style on our website links and text.) We wanted to use this convention of Rihanna’s intimacy for our artist title. We used a handwritten signature of Nand.C as an illusion that she is connected and close to her fans. This also acts as a logo so that fans immediately identify her brand, generating more sales. (This logo can likewise be seen on her website)
- 4. BACK COVER Our back cover displays our artist having their back to the audience. This presents our artist to be mysterious and mischievous. As she is faceless, she pulls attention to her figure, enhancing her sex appeal. This is likewise seen in Beyonce’s ‘4’, where she her back is to the audience. This convention sparks curiosity in the audience where they want to know more about the artist and what they are trying to communicate.
- 5. WEBSITE Our website matches the same simple design as Kelly Rowland and Mary J Blige’s websites. This is a very comfortable design as it doesn’t overwhelm the audience with information. A simple design reflects the R&B genre as an easy and straight-forward style. We developed this simplisticness by sharing conventions with Kelly Rowland’s homepage. She uses a slideshow to display what she has been getting up to for her fans, such as her collaboration with products. Likewise, we used a dissolving slideshow to present multiple images and sell our artist’s star image to fans. We also shared conventions with Mary J Blige’s homepage, in which places the new album title and purchase links in the centre of the page. The simplistic picture and white bold text placed at the very centre draws the viewers eye to it; letting them know that there’s a new album and therefore sales are generated. We thought this was important for our artist as she must generate sales to increase her popularity and synthetic star image.
- 6. BIOGRAPHY Both real media artists Mary J Blige and Kelly Rowland present their fans with a biography page. We felt with Rowland’s page, the layout was not inviting and too much text was involved. We therefore used the conventions of Blige’s simple design – overlaying text upon images or videos. These combines both textual and visual information together, giving the audience a broader insight to the artist’s life and making the page appear more fun and user-friendly. However, we only used one image as the background but deliberately chose a behind the scenes photo to show our artist Nand.C to be extraordinary and ordinary at the same time. However, in terms of the biography we challenged the conventions of talking in 3rd person. This can be seen in Rowland’s and Blige’s biographies where it speaks of them and not by. We wanted our artist to reach out to her fans by connecting to them personally, as the biography was an intimate platform for her fans. We therefore decided to write it in first person and signing it off.