Communication is a Virus!

This was our only colaborative brief of the first year. I was working with Gareth, turns out we work really well together! Long term business partner im thinking.

From the list of possible briefs we chose "Get people to try something new."

This was the broadest possible brief title, which was nice as we could then play around with several concepts.
After brainstorming non-stop for literally 2 days we came to the conclustion that we should target the local music scene in Leeds. There is a huge independent music culture in Leeds which is does not get the exposure it needs to really kick off.
We decided we should aim to promote local music in Leeds and spread awereness of it to the people who are unaware how much of it there is.

Our target audience was slightly complicated, as our idea was based on this premise;
The promotional material would be placed in stores and shops in Leeds which have the image of indie culture, such as Size, Exit, Urban Outfitters and the music stores Crash and Jumbo Records. The customers will go into the store, pick up the promotional material (a free compilation CD with local independent music on it, also an insert which has information on our cause) where they will read about our cause and then pass on the information to people they know who do not know about indie music.
So, out target audience should be the indie culture.

Our vision was very big. We wanted to create a community which promoted the awereness of local indie music. Therefore we would have to work with a range of deliverables. We looked at 'Dont Panic' as inspiration, and how they created their whole image. We decided after both presentation crits with feedback from Ollie, Lauren and Liam that we should create a myspace account which would act as a forum and a place where people can talk, exchange and listen to indie music. The free CD would be the way of getting ourselves into the public domain.

After Sketching out our a load of ideas with Gareth and looking at some other indie CD covers we began developing them with CAD. These were my initial ideas and their development. The lines ideas was taken from the Soul Wax album cover. Plus we got the idea of taking the shape of the CD from a Futureheads album. We had constrains on our use of colour, so we used just one colour plus black. I think it looks pretty nice with the one colour.

The name 'Hidden Tracks' which would be the name of our company refers to the probelem we face of uncovering new music in Leeds which peeople are un aware of. They are hidden from the public by the 5 major label music companies which dominate over 85% of the music industry.

These are the initail designs Gareth came up with. After we both produced our inital ideas, we got together to pick them apart to create the final design.

This is what we came up with. However this is not completly accurate. Our final will be printed on cheap, thin brown paper stock. The colour below is as it is so that when printed onto the brown paper it will appear as a red, not too dissimilar from my initial ideas.

For our final outcome we considered the stock, which is cheap and affordable, so that the free CD can be justified and production could be maintained. Also from the existing sources we bought and picked up from Crash and Jumbo Records almost all used cheap materials, and also had a hand made feel. This is what we aimed to achieve.