Magazine advert analysis

I have to chose to analyse a magazine advert, advertising Gwen Stefani’s new album.

Firstly the background of the advert follows the convention of ‘images of the artist’ . The image that has been used as the background is actually a larger image of the picture that is used on her album cover. Effects have been added to the image to make it stand out and look effective. Using the picture from the album is a good way to advertise the because when people see the album in the shops it will be immediately recognisable and will stand out against the others.
Secondly all the colours used within the advert- coordinate together. They work well together and look professional. The colours have been chosen carefully so that the text placed onto of the images does not distract focus away from the image. Also there isn’t one colour that stands out, they all blend in together.
Another convention that has been used in the magazine advert is, the artists name, this is obviously so that we can identify the artist of the album. Although there is a picture of her, some people may be unaware of her appearance, there for is important to add the name.
The font style used on the text works nicely with the images used on the page, a girly- posh font has been used, obviously as this would attract and be suitable for the target audience of the album.
Another convention that has been used is a small image of the album, so that people know what the album looks like. When people go to buy the album they will already know what they are looking for. The image has been added in the bottom left hand corner of the advert.
The album name has also been added underneath the artist name, and finally some smaller information has been added at the bottom of the page for example the record label and her website where more information would be available.

By Rebecca Gomes

Digipak Analysis

After creating our digipak, that’s consists of six squares we decided that we would analyse two each. We created each part of the digipak in Photoshop.
This is the CD:

Firstly we decided that the majority of the didgipak would have a black background.
We decided that we would make the CD into an eye; we chose to do this because of the many close-ups of the characters eye/ face in the music video. The song we choose is quite slow and storyline of our music video illustrates the main character experiencing a terrible day, many emotions can be conveyed through the use of the eye. To create the eye, we searched ‘eye’ into Google and found an image that we thought would work best. We then cut around the coloured bit of the image and placed this onto the black background. The problem was, once we had cut out the white bit and around the eye, it didn’t really look like an eye anymore, it looked more like a hole. We tried a few different experiments and found that adding different colour affects and filters worked really nicely. We played around with the colour and as a group decided that the blue worked really well and looked effective on the black background.

The second part I am analysing is the back cover of the digipak,

Again we decided to use a black background to stay consistent and to a professional standard. When we researched the conventions of a digipak, we found out that the track list is usually printed on the back cover. We made up eight different song titles and listed these flowing downwards in a logical order. We wanted to keep the back cover simple and not over crowd it, so we thought that just sticking to listing the songs would be enough as we didn’t want to confuse the audience by adding other text. We used white text on top of the black background to create a contrast between the two colours and make it stand out effectively. To finish we simply found a picture of a barcode and added this in the left hand corner, as this was another convention that we had researched.

By Rebecca Gomes

On one of the inside covers of our digipak, we included the song lyrics to Everybodys Changing. We decided to use this because it is a typical convention of digipaks. We used the white text and black background to continue the theme throughout the digipak.


This is a still image taken from our music video, when Daniel is mugged and pushed over. We chose to use this because it is a dramatic image, and reflects the meaning of our music video. We edited the image using Photoshop, to make it slightly more abstract and effective.

By Louise Welch

digipak analysis

When we had finished creating our digipak, we uploaded it to our blog. We then decided that we would analyze 2 parts of the digipak each.
The front of the digipak:
We used the black background to be consistent with the rest of our digipak and make it look professional.
the reason we chose to use the three colors (red, green, blue) to symbolize the theme of changing that is present throughout the song (also relevant is the different levels of thickness). We used the same technique with the three men in different shades of grey. Finally we added the name of the title and artist name in white to create a stark contrast between the background and the text in order for it to stand out and be eye catching.

The reverse front of the digipak:
To create this image we first downloaded an actual picture of the band from the internet. We then split it into 3 layers, the background, the skin and the clothing. The background was changed to pure white, to contrast directly against the silhouettes of the band. The skin was changed to grey, symbolizing lifelessness and negativity. Finally the clothing was saturated to make it more colorful, emphasizing the desaturated skin of the band members.

By Daniel Barrell

Final Digipak

This is our final digipak

Planning Our Digipak

After we had done the research into digipaks, we could begin the planning process. We each designed our own digipak for the artist of our music video, Keane. We used the template to create our digipak. We had to ensure that we use all the conventions of digipaks, while still using images to reflect our music video.

By Louise Welch

Digipak Conventions

- name of the artist/band
- name of the album
- track listing
- artists website and MySpace address
- the record label and logo
- record labels website
- images of the artist
- other relevant images
- price
- barcode
- song lyrics
- reviews on the album(usually from newspapers and magazines)
- album credits(including editors, writers, producers, directors, recorders)
- year of production