The document discusses the process of creating ancillary materials like logos, CD covers, and advertisements for an indie pop girl band called Sassy. It describes how they looked to other bands for inspiration and experimented with different fonts, layouts, and photos. Through feedback from focus groups and research, they realized their initial designs were unrealistic or unclear. They simplified the designs to be more professional, using larger fonts, portrait orientations, and photos that better represented the band's image and album concept of "pulling shapes." The final CD cover and advertisement designs were consistent in using photos from their music video shoot.

1. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
When making our ancillary text we knew it had to stand out and catch our audience’s attention. The
most important part was the logo as it had to be recognisable so that everyone knows who the band
is. As our genre was indie-pop we wanted to try and show this throughout everything. We wanted to
create something which was girly that went with the image of the band and something you could
image seeing in real life. We looked at many CD covers and adverts for inspiration. To make it easier,
we looked at mainly pop girl bands as this was the image we wanted to create.
This CD cover gave us many ideas when
creating ours. It had the right
conventions and features we wanted
to use in our digi pack plan and advert.
As there music is modern but still has a
retro twist, we thought they were
heading us to the right direction. We
can see how their genre, style and
personality is shown throughout their
CD cover. The bright colours indicate
the lively atmosphere in their music
and also give a 50s sense. They all have
individual styles which is what we
wanted to create, as we saw that many
other girl bands try and match each
other. They all have their hair and
make-up done and two of them are
wearing dresses showing their girly
personality. The most obvious thing about this is that they have used a photo of themselves to
promote their music which is important to show your target audience what your band is about. Most
importantly, their logo is very recognisable as it is large and in an appropriate colour so it is
noticeable. They have given equal amount of attention to the logo and to the photo of themselves as
they are both bright and bold so they stand out.

2. Rihanna’s CD cover was a great example to
look at when creating our digi pack. We can
see that she has not got her name on the
album cover, instead she has created her
own logo which anyone could recognise
without having her name of face shown as it
has been made in a way which goes well
with her image. Her logo has also been made
large enough so that it can be seen on the
front cover. Although her CD cover also just
had her photo on it, she has used unique
ideas like having the album name shown as a
tattoo on her arm. Her face is also shown as
a way to almost give u a clue on what her
songs are about. Her hand on her head, dark
make-up and tongue sticking out also give
the audience a hint on what messages her
songs are trying to give.

3. We used a website called Picmonkey to create our fonts which allowed us to experiment with
different colours, styles, boldness and shadows. We then narrowed it down to 9 fonts which we liked
and went well with our band name “Sassy”. We first decided we wanted to have a continuous colour
scheme we would use for all our ancillary tasks. We choose the colours red, white and black as we
felt that red represented love and passion and white and black just make everything stand out so we
felt these colours would work well with our work. We choose font 2 as we thought it was girly and
old fashioned which is what we wanted. We felt that the logo would need to create an image for the
band as well as representing the personalities of the band. We thought this font gave the band a
stylish and funky image.

4. This was our first final outcome after experimenting with different photos, fonts, layout etc. We
booked out the studio to take some professional looking photos for our ancillary tasks. We choose to
have a black background as this would go with our colour scheme. We took a variety of group and
individual pictures. There were pictures of the girls pulling faces and posing to show their
personality. We decided to go with a close up image of the group as this gives the target audience
more detail of what the band like together. We put all the information around the photo so that
nothing was being covered. With the font again, we used red and white to make it stand out.

5. After receiving feedback from our focus groups, we decided to change our idea completely. We
realised that our previous advert had many problems with it and did not look realistic at all. The first
problem with it was that it was landscape and adverts in a magazine are portrait so as we didn’t
have time to take new photos, we still used the same photos and used Photoshop to resize them so
that they were portrait. The font used was too basic and did not go with our band image so we had
to change it. The collage effect we used was making the image unclear, and the whole point of using
an image of the band was so that the target audience could see what they looked like. So we started
again, and did more research into CD covers and adverts and saw that most of them were simple
and usually created the image of their album name. As our album name is “Pull Shapes” we used an
image of the band were they are literally pulling shapes. We couldn’t change the background, but we
did however change our font so that it was more girly and a lot bigger so that everyone could see it.
We put less information on the advert as we thought the more simple it was the more professional it
looked. We also added an extra effect of signatures at the bottom to personalise it for the audience.

6. For our final CD cover, we also changed this completely too. Our previous CD cover was unrealistic as
the plan was to make it open up like two doors however this was too complicated and didn’t work
very well when we tested it. We also wanted to use pictures of the people dancing in our main

7. video. However we forgot to take pictures from our final video so we ended up using pictures from
our rough cut so it was not consistent. We decided we wanted to make our advert and work
consistent, so we used the advert for the front cover and another group picture for the back cover.
For the track list, we used a photo of balloons that we took as this related well to the pull shapes
video as it was set at a party. Inside of the CD cover we used individual pictures of the band to show
the audience what the girls are like individually as well as together.