Research Into Similar Products: Digipak Disc

To get a feel for what kind of designs bands use for their album trays, I have looked at the discs of some of the Cd's that I own to see what they have done.

For the album 'Plans' by Death Cab For Cutie, the design is rather simple. There is only the name of the album included on this as well as some record company information. This is quite a nice design as it simple and fits in nicely with the colour scheme of the rest of the album design.

 The Nine Inch Nails tray for 'Pretty Hate Machine' is quite different from the Death Cab For Cutie one. This tray uses the same bright colours featured on the rest of the album design and features the track listing as well as the band name and album title. This is quite a nice design as it makes the track listing really clear and easy to find, especially as it's featured on the back cover too.

'The Downward Spiral', also by Nine Inch Nails, is rather interesting. It uses a spiral pattern which fits with the title of the album. However it features very little information on it, not even the album name. This simplistic design is nice as it doesn't detract attention from the rest of the art used for the album and is still coherent too.

I also decided to look at how the design for the inner tray of a double album would look. For this I looked at The Smashing Pumpkins 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness' album. The two designs for the disk mirror the names of each disk. The first disc is named 'dawn to dusk' and features a happy face with bright colours to reflect this. The second disc is named 'Twilight to Starlight' which features a sad face with blue colours to reflect the melancholy mood. Both of these designs are in keeping with the designs of the rest of the album and are abstract and eye-catching. They also feature only the title of the disc so keeps the focus on the images.