Research & Planning: Album Poster Print Production

When starting to produce my promotional poster for the Digipak I only knew that I wanted it to be very much similar to the actual Digipak, using the same, or similar, fonts, pictures and themes.

So to start with I went for a landscape orientated poster with the main focus being the same photograph of the bench I have used for my front and back cover of the Digipak. This seems a very good way to automatically create relation between the two products and if it were to be a real task to be used in the industry, having the same picture helps people to recognise the CD after seeing the poster, possibly creating more sales.

I then used the same font as previously used in my Digipak and centred the large font so that it is immediately attention grabbing and can be recognised straight away, as recognition is a key part of any advertising campaign. I did think about using the torn paper effect again at this point but after trialling it I decided not to as it blocked the bench and was not necessary as the dark metal of the bench and the brown of the leaves creates a visually appealing background anyway.

However, I knew that I wanted to use the torn paper effect so decided to integrate it into the poster at this point. I have recognised from my previous research that a major feature of album posters are ratings from popular music magazines. Including these ratings seemed to be a good way of proving the quality of the music being sold, so naturally I decided to utilise this feature. I used the torn paper effect to make these ratings stand out more than they would against the natural cloudy sky, this also creates correlation between the Digipak and the poster, exactly what I had been trying to do with the font as well.

The finishing touches to my work were just to include more information about Sony Music Entertainment and the rights involved with distribution of the music, give the address to the bands website as well as MySpace page and add a logo associated with the record label the band are signed to. All these are features that appeared on all the posters I looked at in my research.