Developing digipaks and homepages for Idea 2

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Ben Howard is an up and coming artist, who's focus is mainly on the music rather than the star image. He is a synthetic act, and his album and homepage designs reflect this anonymity behind the music.





The Digipak for Howard's latest album 'I Forgot Where We Were'. The cover features only himself on it, the first album cover of his to have that. Yet, there we can only really see have his face. This album cover reflects his star image. He is not quite a star, but up and coming. His focus is still on the music but has increasing popularity with his target audience. If I were to see this CD cover in the shop I would think of it to be of an indie alternative genre. Furthermore, the title and artist name is hidden in the corner of the cover. This subtlety tells the audience that he is a synthetic act, as he is not making an obvious effort to brand himself and his music.


    The design is simplistic and neutral. I like how he doesn't need any massive labelling or design to sell his music. His unique selling point is that his style is so simple and relaxing. This design matches his style of music. 



























These are designs from older albums, instead of featuring himself feature drawings and photographs. The theme around these designs are old vintage looking. They also relate to the album title (Black flies, Old Pine etc.)

With my design, I would want a simplistic design, that connotes the passion for the music instead of the star image. I particularly like the drawings and the neutral tones of the images. The greys and blacks give a soft and relaxing mood. These images are clearly from an indie synthetic act.

My favourite album design by Ben Howard is for the Burgh Island. It's composition fills the cover with parallel lines, the design is so filling yet so simple and clean cut. The breaking of the lines to show the Burgh Island is all the album needs to relate to the title, and show the audience that this is a chilled low key acoustic style of music.



I also looked at some similar artists such as José González and Damien Rice, who are also acoustic indie male singers. 


González captures a similar style to Howard's covers. They are simple album art, subtly drawn but somehow fills the page. The album title and artist name tucked away. However, these album designs are more colourful and engaging that Howard's, matching his more upbeat style of music than Howard's. Likewise, González has a smaller audience than Howard's, therefore his star image is not as developed. This may be one of the reasons why you don't see anything featuring the singer, but instead drawings that his music reflects.

I particularly love these designs and how simple they are. In terms of album covers I believe Less is more when displaying something of the indie genre. The design must be simple and soothing to match the simpleness and calming music it goes with.

Similarly, Damien Rice also takes on the clean cut drawing designs for his album 'My Favourite Faded Fantasy'. This design feels more personal than the others, especially  with the album title including 'My'. The feelings I receive from this cover is that we're looking at something thats very close to Rice. There is a hint of sadness in this cover. The vintage colourless look of the cover is a contrast to those of González's. In terms of my cover, I think that Conrad is a combination of colourful and colourless. I like the idea of my digipak containing faded washed out colours, if even that. 

I then began looking at websites. Howard's website is similarly a clean and simple design. There is no obvious information or any advertising to buy his album or sell tickets. The design is very raw and real. You simply see his logo in the corner, along with his latest album cover filling the webpage. However, you are automatically redirected to his autoplayed music video for his single 'I Forgot Where We Were', which has been scaled up to fill the page. Personally I don't like this feature as it takes away the simpleness of the page, and you can't pause/stop the video. The video is also bad quality as it's been stretched to fit the page. 

The colour scheme matches the album covers and the concept of the information being in the corners out of sight to make a clean look is something that I would like to replicate. I think with this style of music, there is no reason to overwhelm the viewer with lots of information. Instead it introduces the viewer to a simple and subtle design.
Similarly with other artist's pages, they also match the album covers. However, they all have different layouts. Rice's for example, has the webpage designed like a blog page. The information is received by scrolling down the page looking at posts with a timestamp. I personally don't like this design because it is cluttered and information can be very easily missed.
 José González's webpage is similar in format. It has a scroll to see more information about the artist. The design is cleaner than Rice's, and the colour scheme matches the latest album cover.

I then stumbled across this pianist/photographer's website Alex Kozobolis. Although this is a combined website showing his different platforms of work, I really liked the design of this page.  The logo is neatly in the corner, the stunning photos shuffle randomly. The page simply showcases the work of the artist and doesn't push information in the viewer's face. This is similar to Howard's design. 



For my webpage, I think I will have a clean and neat theme, which matches the album cover and colour schemes. I think this clean theme matches the star image and style of Howard. It is about the music, rather than getting sales. 

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