The document discusses creating a cohesive brand image for an artist named Emerald across a digipak, magazine advert, and music video. It summarizes the consistent elements used across the three media, including Emerald's costume, makeup, and intense red dress/lipstick. The color schemes, fonts, and period details are also consistent to link the pieces together. The document provides details on design choices for the digipak and advert to guide the viewer's eyes along a reading path and emphasize different elements. It discusses how the pieces contribute to expanding Emerald's star qualities of glamour, dominance, and talent within a meta-narrative framework.
2. Creating a Cohesive Brand Image
We have set out to create a cohesive star image to promote the album through a consistent aesthetic
across the digipak, magazine advert and the music video.
Emerald’s costume and make-up is consistent across all three texts as is intense saturated red of
Emerald’s dress and lipstick is eye-catching, which are all iconic motifs. The black headband is
appropriate of the 1920s period setting and features in all three texts.
Both the print and digipak use high key lighting as part of the glamorous nature of electro swing as a
genre, and the video uses this where it is tonally appropriate, such as in the performance with the stage
lighting.
3. Creating a cohesive brand image
The colour scheme is consistent across each of the texts, primarily we use
intense reds, sharp yellows (particularly for the print work), contrasting
blacks and whites, and in the advert and video, softer blues.
We use the same font across both the advert and the digipak
The font is the same across both texts but the yellow is much more
saturated and intense in the advert to make it stand out more in the
advert to make it more defined and thus more eye-catching as it is
more commercialised and less personal than the digipak would feature
in a magazine, where it would be up against other adverts.
The soft hue of the blue matches the softness of
the colours in the other texts, but in the video
they are designed to look more ominous. In the
digipak the soft colours are designed to make
the viewer feel more at ease, and showcase a
less intimidating side of the artist
4. Links to the Video
Both the advert and the digipak link to the video through the use of period
details such as the costume, with the Charleston headband and the pearls.
The colour scheme is consistent across the three aspects of the campaign, red
being the most distinct and defining colour, but yellow and darker tones also
play a significant part in linking all three texts.
5. Magazine choice
Our advert was designed to run in Time Out magazine, as a landscape half
page spread.
Time Out is the most widely read entertainment magazine in London, with 1
million readers a month, but they are committed to supporting up and
coming talents like Emerald, and as such she has achieved enough success
for a half page spread, but not enough for a whole page spread.
However this wide circulation means that they need general appeal and
have a target audience with a variety of tastes they have to cater to, and as
such do not prioritise any particular genre, which means genre hybrids like
electro-swing have a fair chance of being included.
They have run articles and pieces promoting Emerald in the past, which is
strong evidence that they are interested in her as an artist. For example
this piece promotes Emerald performing at Eventim Apollo, Hammersmith:
http://www.timeout.com/london/music/caro-emerald
6. Design Choices
The direction her eyes
are facing point the
viewer towards the
more specific
information about the
album, which forces
them to take in the
artist's name, and finally
the most important
aspect of the additional
information – that the
album is out
The title being covered slightly by Emerald's
head leads on to look at her face. However this
should not catch the viewer's eyes first as her
hair and the edges of her figure are blurred.
The reading path in the
print advert is created
through size, the sharp,
saturated reds and yellows
of the title are designed to
catch the viewer's eye first
as they are placed over
muted, distorted colours in
the background
The platforms the album are available on are out of the way, in the bottom
left side of the screen, so that they don't interfere with the core reading
path, but the information is still there so that if they are interested in the
album, they can still buy it
7. Design Choices
The title design on both the digipak and advert anchors the sophisticated elements of Emerald's
persona, “The” and “Miss Emerald” uses a font that looks neatly hand-written and elegant, and
“Shocking” has another colour and pattern layer over it as if it is plated with metal
The white borders in the corners of the digipak's panels were partly inspired by the video for Alice
Francis' “Gangster Love” (2013) which has white borders around the entire video. These are white,
and ornate looking, and we expanded on this for our digipak by adding more detail to them, but also
shrinking them down and limiting them to the borders so that they did not letter-box the image and
clutter the frame.
8. Design Choices
The font is also sans serif to give it a kind of smoothness and clarity which is fitting
of swing as a genre. This is especially evident in the text for the track listing, which
uses the same font as the digipak for “Scenes from the Cutting Room Floor”, one of
Emerald's previous albums.
The colour scheme is also consistent with this, the text alternates between yellow
and white for each word on a red background, and our advert does a similar thing,
alternating between reds and yellows on each line.
The colour of the text
alternates between two
complimentary colours to
clearly define how the text
should be read and to create
an overall aesthetically
pleasing image.
9. Meta-narrative
By applying Dyer's critical framework on the construction of the star image to
the three aspects of our campaign, it is evident we are trying to contribute to
Emerald's star qualities of glamour, dominance, and expanding on her meta-
narrative by emphasising additional star qualities such as talent.
The glamorous side of Emerald is primarily shown through her costume which
uses bold saturated colours and smaller accessories such as her rings which
are visible on the front panel of the digipak. There is an element of more
traditional star qualities within this, such as materialism, but the three texts
emphasise how these elements contribute to her sense of style rather than
relying solely on the expensive nature of her costume.
The rings in the final
production are blurred and
behind the title but they
complement the elegant and
glamorous aesthetic of the
text by still being visible
through the gaps in the
words
10. Meta-narrative
Emerald's sense of dominance is present in her previous promotional
material. This is demonstrated in the video through the narrative
where Emerald leads the group of vampires in the band during the
attack during the climax and is the first to bite anyone, and more
subtly in the advert where she is given greater importance than the
band, who are out of focus in the background and who she is paying
no attention to.
For example on the cover for the
“Deleted Scenes from the Cutting Room
Floor” digipak, her posture reflects her
dominance in relation to her target
audience, as she is viewed from a slight
low angle and her head is very
purposefully turned to the right.
She is almost in profile, but
angled in such a way that both
eyes are visible so that it is very
obvious she is looking almost
dismissively away from the
viewer
Her hand touching her chin emphasises
her eye line and her domineering
attitude.
11. Meta-narrative
This concept of dominance most obviously ties into the importance of
hegemony in creating the star image, as Emerald directly keeps aloof of her
audience, and this is a significant contributing factor to the incoherence of
her star persona. This dominance allows her to distance herself from her
audience which makes it impossible to “complete” her image as she will
always be above them.
By hiding Emerald's eyes in the
digipak and having her look away
distantly in the advert she we create
the paradox that she is both present
and absent, as her lack of focus on
the audience make her seem so
distant that she seems as if she is
not entirely a part of the image.
12. Meta-narrative
The star quality of talent has been present in Emerald's promotional material in the past, such as
in the “Tangled Up” video, where the location she performed in reflected how her talent has
earned her enough interest to be performing at a venue of a decent size. However, the narrative
does not fully support this as she was not the focus, and the leading characters' love triangle took
priority, which was conveyed through the dance choreography. We expand on this in our video by
having Emerald as the focus of the performance and giving other characters little screen time.
At the performance in our video Emerald is generally framed in a close up, giving the audience
little choice but to focus on her singing. The character blocking at the performance in our video
builds on what “Tangled Up” established, as there is a greater number of people at our
performance, emphasised by how densely grouped they are. They are all dancing, and they are
all there specifically to see Emerald perform, but in “Tangled Up” she is more a part of the
scenery, and there are fewer people dancing and engaged in her performance.
