digipak and website

1. Digipak and
Website

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.