Applying Research to my Website Design

My previous indie-pop website research gave me an insight on how artists of the genre layout their websites, and I'll be following some of the conventions used. 

All three artists I looked at stuck to very simple yet modern designs, something that I feel is representative of the electro/indie pop genre sound. They also only used a maximum of 3 colours throughout and they all matched with their latest album releases. This gave them a very consistent and professional look, and I've chosen to design my website following these conventions. 

I plan for my website to be primarily black and white (like the front and back cover of my digipak) and then for my third 'colour' I'll be using a similar technique to the London Grammar website. I've decided to take some band shots, potentially on Dartmoor and at a beach location, to show the duo and present their fresh, indie and quirky character. However, I plan to edit the photos so they're all roughly similar in colour, so that this will act as my third 'colour' on my website. 

It was my website research that swayed me from using my inner digipak design on the website. Despite its effectiveness at showing the duos creativity and imagination on the digipak, I felt that their were too many bright colours for it to look effective on my website - it could feel clustered and this would stray away from the simplistic design I'm after. This is therefore why I've chosen to use band shots instead, with the black and white and simplicity of the website providing the link with the digipak. 

My research also showed me how different artists use text differently depending on the image they want to represent; more edgy groups tended to have less text, whereas groups such as Oh Wonder, with their laid-back, gentle style have more text. 

I plan to be fairly minimal with my text; however, may create an 'about' page which I've seen on several websites since my initial research in which I will use a fair amount of colloquial language to address the viewers. This will be representative of the character of Oh Wonder and will provide an engaging element; however, on the whole my website will have minimal text and will keep in the simplistic and modern style of the indie pop website design. 

Final Digipack

Here's my final digipak design. 

Overall its design is very similar to my initial draft. So on my front and back cover I've created the silhouette design, and kept the whole thing black and white. It looks modern and clean and I feel this reflects the modern, electro sound of the group. On the inside several of the images have changed since my draft; however I have stuck to my initial idea for the concept. All the objects used were found around my house and some of them reflect the song titles in an obvious way (e.g. the heart represents Heart Hope) and others in a more abstract way (e.g. the marble represents Midnight Moon). Some of the objects have no link to the song list at all (e.g. the banana) however, they are all playful and childlike objects and so it enforces the image I wanted to produce, this image being the imaginative and pure nature of the duos music (I felt using small child-like objects would represent this). 

Digipak Progress (Silhouette work)

For the silhouette shots I was aware I had to make it easy to see that it was a boy and girl (to represent the Oh Wonder duo). Therefore I made the girl wear a dress and have her hair flowing, whilst I made my hair stand out and wore jeans etc. so that in the silhouette we'd be easily distinguishable. 

I also experimented with several photographs (below is a sample) because I was unaware which photos would look best as silhouettes. In one of these shots we created O W (Oh Wonder) using our hands, and I have now decided to use this for my front cover as it looks very effective as a silhouette.

Initially I was unsure how I'd be able to create the silhouette effect for my front and back cover. I wanted to create a matte black silhouette and experimented with PowerPoint to see if this would be possible to achieve on there. 

I discovered that despite giving a reasonable silhouette effect, PowerPoint didn't provide the mat black effect that I required as it still showed our faces, and I felt this would detract from my simplistic pure black silhouette concept so decided to use Photoshop as it is designed for editing photos so was more likely to have the tools necessary.

Using the 'quick selection' tool in Photoshop I could easily remove the background and I also used the tool to highlight the individual parts of the photos that I wanted to turn black. After highlighting the parts I right clicked and selected fill and change the 'contents use' to 'black' with 100% opacity and this gave the matte black silhouette effect. 

Music Video Final Cut