Evaluation - Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Having passionately studied graphic design for a while, I was looking forward to making my print work appear professional and up-to-date, but most importantly - attractive to my target audience.

I concentrated on making my work have an apparent "house" style, I wanted my print work to connect visually with my music video, so that all three products could be sold together as a "promotion package for the release of an album".

I gave my advert and digipak a running theme, with a controlled, limited colour scheme.
You will notice the colour palette consists mainly of blue, white, yellow and black - (subtly connoting danger signs).



I ensured the colours were strictly controlled by paying attention to the CMYK codes.
For example, the yellow on both pieces of print has the same code of - C-2% M-4% Y-77% K-0%

In order to fit in with the genre of my song, and to attract my target audience of fashionable teenagers, I gave my print work a modern, fashionable appearance.
I focused on visual themes relating to my song such as money, fashion and street-crime.
Once I had created all my relevant images, I edited them so they appeared clean and bold against the intended white background.

Both the advert and digipak use a white background, but this was a little too plain and boring in my opinion, so I applied a small amount of detail to both pieces - yellow and black running in straight lines through the products.
This not only made both pieces more interesting, it made them fit together visually adding to the house style.
The yellow lines were supposed to denote double yellow lines on a road, relating once again to the street genre of the overall promotion package.

I spent a fair amount of time browsing Dafont.com to find some typefaces that I felt would "fit in" with my work.

As you will see from one of my previous blog posts, I found a handful of fonts that seemed "grimy" and "urban". Ones that were sans-serif and bold were the most successful.

Check them out by following this link -
http://jackparsonsa2media.blogspot.com/2010/12/downloaded-fonts.html


I applied the relevant text to my print work and ensured the same fonts were used across both pieces.
I chose to display the text in varying sizes depending on it's purpose and its "importance".
All the text was displayed in black, once again to maintain the bold, hard-hitting appearance against the white background and could even give the impression of a newspaper heading.

The text within my print is sharp and has quite an imperative mode of address, it seems quite "bossy"; once again relating to the visual themes of the whole project.

When I was photographing my baby brother with the weapons, I chose to put a hooded jacket on him to fit in with the generic themes, and to match the imagery of the main character in our music video.

In contrast, to emphasise the innocence of the child, instead of him wearing a plain hoodie, I chose to put a hoodie on him with a playful image of a truck on the front.

The weapons that my brother holds were especially selected to look realistic and dangerous, this imagery matches imagery within my music video, strengthening the connection between all three products.

Something quite entropic of my print work is that it could be assumed that in order to fit in with the "dangerous" genre of my song, my work would have to be dark and gloomy.
Whereas I chose to create mine with a lot of lighting on the subjects and bright, contrasting colours; I did this to make the products stand out.
Swamping my work with a large range of colours and making the products too crowded would result in them being visually untidy.
Whilst designing my print work I tried to imagine the digipak on a shelf in HMV, and I tried to imagine the advert on a wall somewhere, this is what made me want to use bold, eye-catching colours.

I really wanted both my pieces of print work to connect with each other, and when producing our music video, I tried to relate this with the print.
Synergy occurred in my work, you may have noticed the sly product placement of my album advertisement on the wall.
The inter-textual reference is on the wall in the main character's bedroom, a subtle way of reminding how all three products are from the same package, all aimed at the same audience and essentially all bringing in the same profit together.

So in answer to question 2, I do feel the combination of my main product and ancillary texts is very effective.