We also came up with the following idea: from the analysis we conducted, digipaks are often released by established bands with a strong existing fanbase, and are released in conjunction with a standard edition of the album. Therefore, we decided to put a spin on the task - we would create two covers, one being the front cover artwork for the standard edition of the album, and the other one (with full gatefold artwork) being for the digipak 'deluxe' edition. It's worth noting that, in these scenarios, the special edition/digipak album cover is often subtly but noticably different from the regular edition cover; normally just enough for fans of the band to spot.
We swiftly came up with 3 designs for the front cover of the digipak, which would therefore shape the rest of the gatefold design. Here they are:
Design 1
This is something that Mike largely created, and has a very distinctive, elegant look - when I first saw it, it reminded me of the old 1930s/40s film reels and black and white films, especially with the construction lines around the band logo. What was my primary concern, however, was that it didn't really link back to the video in terms of style, though the cold colours and elegant vine-type designs on the band logo do help. However, what it does have is a convention present on previous AFI album covers - a relatively plain cover with the title and logo directly in the centre of the cover. It wound up being more of a benchmark for us to go from, and as you will see, we used certain aspects of this design in the other ideas.Design 2:
The original inspiration for this design came from the third of my design sketches from the Planning stage post, taking the idea of a rolling cloud skyscape set on the ground of slightly windswept long grass to give a mystical, natural feel to it. We took it into Photoshop and expanded on this, creating the rolling clouds look entirely in Photoshop. However, what this does leave it open to is the possibility that some of the cloud photos we do have could be used and combined with these 'artificial' clouds and augment them. The first design is for the regular edition album, and the second design here, with subtle differences to the colouring of the sky and clouds and the leaves scattering in 
from either side into the logo, is for the digipak edition. As I explained earlier, the digipak is often aimed squarely at the existing fans of the band, and therefore, as you can see, the covers are very similar, but the differences are also easily noticable and they can be distinguished from each other, with the extra elements in the digipak album cover setting it apart as the special, superior edition out of the two. We re-used the construction line concept from the first design, but modified the logo and title font to suit the band a lot more.Design 3
This final design is a variation on the first design, and uses a basic photo of a plain concrete wall as a foundation to create a simple but effective design which really plays on AFI's gothic style. Using a similarly elegant font to the previous design, the logo and album title is meant to look like it has been carefully painted on the wall (hence the faux dribble of paint off the I in AFI), with the shadowing around the edges to give a sense of darkness to the cover. As is the case with the previous one, the digipak cover has just enough differences to seperate it enough from the regular edition cover, as it has vine graphics surrounding the logo, taking inspiration from The Damned's 'The Black Album' 
artwork. It looks more and more likely that we will select the second design to expand on, as we can expand the artwork across the entire gatefold and it offers us nice levels of scope, as well as fitting in with the mystical, gothic edge that AFI have, and in terms of the feeling of the colours, it does link with our video subtly.
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