Designing a Digipak: Print Research 1

Firstly, the advert promoting the digipak of Lana Del Rey's Born to Die album, has been shot in a front shoulder close up of the artist's face which is located in the middle of the front cover while the left and right side of the cover are of parts of a grey building which is a good example of the mise-en scene process which sets up our artist. The layout of the lighting and backgrounds used takes place on a calm peaceful day which is ironic since judging by the title "Born to Die" and the depressed, blank expression on the artist's face, the song featured is going to be a depressing one. According to her website, One of Lana's favourite genre of music she preforms is Indie Pop and alternative hip-hop which seems to be focus of Born to Die which unlike other indie pop music backgrounds which have either been recoloured or done on a computer, this cover seems to have created from a photocopied image of Lana pasted onto the front cover of a real image of a grey building which is supposed to be seen as the type of world this cover is supposed to be in which is redundant.

On the advertisement page, all the text is in large print with the majority of the text being written in blue font colour, expect for the main heading which takes up almost a quarter of the front page in which the colour of the text is written in a white font positioned on top of the image of the sky background which is ironic as the blue text is located against Lana's white shirt. This ends up making the audience see the colour scheme of the digipak which is blue and white. As most Digipaks tend to have a colour scheme of two colours, this is a fairly basic colour scheme.

At the lower middle of the poster, there are two paragraphs highlighted by small red font text at their sides which represent the names of the newspapers "The Independent" and the "Q Magazine." The blue text next to them displays their short opinions on the album which are usually taken from an extract of the album's official review. Both The Independent and Q Magazine have given the album major positive reviews saying it's an "sensation" and "the years most eagerly awaited debut album" However according to other sites such as Slant Magazine and Rolling Stone, When the album was released on November 12th 2012, it gained mostly mixed to positive reviews, with Rolling Stone saying that although the lyrics, with their "pop-trash perversity", were the strength of the album but they criticised the fact that Del Rey had a voice that was “pinched and prim” and that she "wasn't ready to make an album yet" and The AV Club panned the album, calling it "Shallow and overwrought, with periodic echoes of Ke$ha's Valley Girl aloofness, the album lives down to the harshest preconceptions against pop music." Despite this it was major success in the music office with about 50000 copies being sold in the UK on it's release date. The size of the advertisement poster given to me is on an A3 poster with the main image taking up about three quarters of the paper. The reason for this is because the main image can be looked at as a redundant metaphor for a photograph and the white border can be seen and set up as an abstract white photo frame as if to give the image a more timeless "back in my days" feel.

Since Lana Del Ray looks close to her early to late twenties according to the front cover, it is fairly obvious that the main target audience will be young female adults aged between 18-25 years old. The main appealing elements for young adults are the facial expressions of Lana as they look sad and emotional which is something that younger women are likely to be. The blue and white text is large and would probably attract the attention of art collectors as they match both in the right backgrounds with the white text being in the blue background and the blue text in the white background.