This document discusses the design of three indie rock album covers and how they relate to the design of the author's own album cover. It notes that Grayson Gilmour's album cover features a painted distorted head, using cold colors that create mystery. It also discusses how the author's cover and The Kaiser Chiefs' use bold fonts and primary colors to stand out and attract audiences. Finally, it describes how Foster the People uses a plain white background to make the artwork stand out, a common indie rock convention that helps identify the genre and create a brand identity without showing band members' faces.

2. DESIGN IDEA– GRAYSON GILMOUR
Grayson Gilmour is an Indie Rock artist who hasn’t had a massive career
but became known at 16 for his solo CD-R’s. Grayson’s album front
cover for his album ‘Infinite Life!’ has a painted image of a distorted
head on it. Similarly the Inside Right of our Digipak was constructed
using four individual shots of the four different band members, as is
shown beneath. We used Adobe Premiere Photshop, to create this
image, whereas Grayson’s front cover, was painted as so. Both our
design and Grayson’s include cold, harsh colours that create a sense of
mystery and unknown conforming to the conventions of an Indie Rock
band. However on the other hand, similarly both Grayson and ourselves
have challenged the main convention by having the artists faces on the
digipak, this is because those of an Indie Rock genre, concentrate more
on their music than their image, and so don’t present the audience with
their image, so that when their target audience look at the digipak they
see a band who focus on their music, relating to Dyer’s Star Theory that
the artists remain present as well as absent, which other artists have
not done.

3. FONT AND COLOURS – THE KAISER CHIEFS
FRON
T
BACK
The use of the fonts and colours in the Digipak for The Kaiser Chiefs is similar to
that of my digipak as both albums reflect a fun, childish and simplistic style. Bold
fonts have been used for both digipaks in order to attract the target audience to the
product because the font is bold and clear and therefore stands out. Similarly both
bands of the Indie Rock genre haven’t displayed pictures of the band themselves,
conforming to Dyer’s theory concerning the absence and presence of the band
members. Furthermore, the fact that the band members are not featured on the front
of the digipak also coincides with their organic image. The font used for both our
digipak and The Kaiser Chief’s is clear to read and creates an identification of the
music rather than the artist, reaching out to their target audience. The majority of
other Indie Rock Band’s digipaks, use cold colours, usually dark reds, blues and
blacks, highlighting the fact that our digipak challenges the mainstream
conventions and forms, through the use of primary colours reflecting the type of
music within the album. Similarly to The Kaiser Chiefs digipak, we have used similar
colours all the way through, linking all three products.

4. LAYOUT – FOSTER THE PEOPLE
Foster the people’s album artwork for the album torches, utilised a very
similar style in terms of the plain white setting for the background of the
digipak which worked effectively at making the text and artwork placed
in the centre of the design stand out and have more of an impact and
therefore attract the target audience. During the research process I
noticed that a plain white background is a common convention utilise
for indie rock albums due to the fact that it is eye catching and therefore
by utilising this convention it allowed our target audience to clearly
identify the genre of music for our band. Furthermore, due to the fact
that there was no imagery of the actual band members, it helped to
create a brand identity for the band as well as reflecting their organic
image.