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The extra planning extended around the rest of the digipak, and to a certain extent, the way that the digipak design could lead into the magazine advert design. This is why we chose to work on the digipak album cover first - as we will see in the magazine advert analysis, magazine adverts, 99 times out of 100, keep a very distinctive house style and use similar, if not identical, imagery, colours and styles from the digipak/album cover artwork.
Firstly, here is a design I sketched for the back cover and tracklisting of the album. It is basically a piece of scrappy notebook paper with the tracklisting scribbled on it, including also the tracklisting to the bonus DVD included in the digipak section. However, it has hints of being a suicide note, as it has 'to my love...' written at the top as an introduction, and there are lines running through the track names, and the letters that the lines run through spell, if you read it vertically downwards, 'DIE WITH ME'. Again, as you can tell, this is a big hint back to the narrative, and thought it does appear subtle, the message becomes very clear when the reader works out the deleted letters.
Also, we had an idea to create two covers - one for the regular version for the album, and one for the digipak version. As I outlined in the digipak cover analysis post, digipaks are often aimed at existing fans of the band, and they are often released in conjunction with a regular CD version of the album. So we decided to create two different varients of the same cover, with one being a little simpler and less extravegant, and aimed purely more for the target audience and perhaps new fans, and the digipak cover being more stylised and subtly different, and aiming at the existing fans of the band.
More to follow...
On to planning now, and this stage began with some simple sketches by me, based on imagination and imagery I saw in the song. A lot of these were, admittedly, based also on the now-defunct narrative section, or at least vaguely, as we felt it would be better to give perhaps our narrative interpretation of the lyrics via the album cover rather than continue on the performance element of the main video, which we feel would simply become a little overused if continued into the promo material and covers.
Below are a series of sketches I designed for the front cover.
The first cover is a landscap
e style shot, taken from what would have been the rooftop where the narrative section would have concluded, with some vague litter and waste paper to further enhance the derelict look. It also has a small, retro-style radio on the ground, a reference back to the lyrics ('the broken radio was playing suicide'). The main focal point is the sky, with rolling, dark clouds coming in from the right and contrasting steeply with the bright sunshine on the left. This is meant to represent the bittersweetness of the original narrative - life seems bleak, but at the same time, there is hope.
This second cover is another cover which directly relates to the narrative, and is actually referencing the suicide at the end, where the female character holds back and doesn't jump with the male character. In this shot, it is a point-of-view shot from the female character, looking down off the edge of the rooftop at the male character below, whom, instead of being dead (as he would have been in the narrative), is standing and looking back up at the female character, as if to ask why she backed out. The problem with this one is that it is perhaps too strongly linked to the narrative, and if the narrative it is based on is not there in the video, it may look out-of-place on the album cover.
This third shot is perhaps my favourite of the designs. It is a variation on the first cover, but instead of having a rooftop, it used a field full of long grass, blowing in the breeze, as the landscape. The skyline is also a little different, with less sunshine here - it has a much more bleak look to it with the clouds sweeping across. I like it as it manages to capture the feeling of the narrative without actually directly referencing the defunct narrative structure, and therefore it will look good on the cover in it's own right.
This fourth and final design is another direct hint back to the narrative structure, as it shows what would have been the male character from the narrative standing in amongst the long grass of the field from the previous design. The sky is plainer, with no rolling clouds; in fact, there are quite probably no clouds at all, and instead replaced by a clear sky at sunset. This could invoke the ending of something (of life?), but at the same time, a sunset can be a beautiful thing.
More planning work to come...
As the main video was completed, we also made very good progress on the digipak cover. We placed particular priority on this ancillary task first as, in our past knowledge and early analysis of the magazine advert ancillary task, the magazine advert and other promotional material often has a very distinctive house style based almost exclusively off the album artwork.
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.
Firstly, here is a design I sketched for the back cover and tracklisting of the album. It is basically a piece of scrappy notebook paper with the tracklisting scribbled on it, including also the tracklisting to the bonus DVD included in the digipak section. However, it has hints of being a suicide note, as it has 'to my love...' written at the top as an introduction, and there are lines running through the track names, and the letters that the lines run through spell, if you read it vertically downwards, 'DIE WITH ME'. Again, as you can tell, this is a big hint back to the narrative, and thought it does appear subtle, the message becomes very clear when the reader works out the deleted letters.
