R+P Post 24: Planning my digipak panels

The front and back panels of Calvin Harris' album, "18 months"

Having planned our website, we decided we would plan our digipak panels.

We decided the best approach to designing our digipak would be to first look at existing albums by other artists in the EDM genre, and ascertain what conventions seemed to be followed with their albums.


After looking at existing designs I found the following to be common conventions:

• The album name is usually displayed clearly on the front and on the spine.
• A track list is usually shown on the back cover.
• There is always a barcode, usually on the back.
• There is usually institutional information alongside the barcode.
• The artist name is usually shown by the album name.

Hardwell's album 'United We Are' also reinforced the aspects of
album covers I felt were conventional.

Most of our designs include pictures of our artist on the cover as the relationship between the audience and artist needs to be reinforced.

Initially we were not sure what to display on the inside of the digipak, we decided we should have a photo of Orlando on one of the inside sides.Feedback from classmates suggested we should also put something on the side the disk would be on. 

Our label's logo (we decided to use the same
style of vinyl record as a graphic underneath
where the disk would rest in the digipak.)

Ignacio suggested putting a vinyl disk (like our label's logo) on the disk side. This sounded like a good idea so we all agreed to it.

I decided to draw up a rough sketch of the design ideas we had come up with and agreed on, I then annotated this with the conventions of album covers that we were planning to include. The sketches are shown below.

The design I drew.