How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

An important aspect of creating the ancillary texts is making all parts tie together, keeping a running theme and consistency throughout. This helps an audience to identify them as one, to create an artists persona through the use of different medias.

When researching digipaks, I looked at three very closely:

Major Lazer - 'Guns Dont Kill People...Lazers Do!'

Conor Maynard - 'Contrast' 

Plan B - 'The Defamation Strickland Banks'.

Firstly Major Lazer use the bright, fun Rastafarian colours of red, yellow and green to highlight the reggae genre. These colours weave all the way through their digipaks, as well as their cartoon theme. They also relate themselves strongly with guns, crimes and women! These aspects shine through, the images of women, guns, bats, lighting etc on the front and also having two large guns featuring on the CD. Another thing they do consistently, is their cartoon theme  - they have their own cartoon character who is 'Major Lazer', he is seen as a sort of tribal worrier, he is featured on both album cover and tracklist to link them all together. In all texts they have a consistent font, all written in black, except the album title.

I then looked at Conor Maynard, his digipak is very different in a sense that it is very minimalist in comparison to Major Lazer's. Images of him are featured on album cover, tracklist and the booklet back, he is a new solo artist so it is very important he gets his image out there, he is a pop artist meaning image is important for the young female fans! The font is consistent throughout the digipak.

Very different to both of these is Plan B's digipak, running throughout is the musical theatre theme. Because he is an already established artist he doesn't need to feature so much, very minimal colours are used; black, white and red which contrast well with each other also the font is the same throughout.

After looking at these three digipaks I was able to see clearly that there is some aspect linking them all together. I used the same font, and the same colour palette throughout, also a common natural outdoor theme throughout. I also noticed that the artist name appeared on most aspects of the digipak, I used that because it was an obvious indication that they are relate to the same product.

Visual links that I have used to ensure my Video and ancillary texts look like a consistent package - they all use:

• Natural theme - outdoors in countryside, the beach, fruits, the sea
• Colours - muted pinks and earthy green/brown colour pallette, in contrast with strong use of black
• Calm, relaxed imagery - non aggressive 
• Prominent stylised artist signature - used both vertically and horizontally
• Album title in defined, consistent font and position relative to the signature
• Natural looking model photography - natural looking make-up, healthy natural long hair and all of the photography used was taken during the same photo-shoot for consistency.

I wanted to conform to reggae conventions by using an outdoors theme, but fuse together a summer beach/pool theme with a more European countryside outdoor feel within my video. I chose to use the countryside location element form the video for ancillary text imagery in my digipak, to appeal to my European audience.