Brand Identity

I have chosen two artists who are of a similar genre and style to my selected artist. As my artist is mixed with lots of genres I have chosen the closest artists to represent these genres. Below are the artists with a their website, album cover and magazine article.

Official Secrets Act - www.myspace.com/officialsecretsact

I can see that they have used brand identity across their website, album cover and magazine advert. It isn't that obvious when you first look at them all but it is their. 

Both their album cover and magazine advert have the same font for their artist name. The band don't have a logo so they have used their own band name instead, but added an appropriate font style to it, which reflects their relaxing sounding music. The album cover is also on the advert, which stands out because the background is white and the album cover is blue/green. A lot of white space is used on the magazine advert which is similar to their Myspace (they don't have an official website). The background on their myspace is very plan but also looks like the background on the album cover. The 3 house colours which the band have used on all 3 of their promotional material are white, black and blue. Not only are they selling their music on their album cover, but they are also selling their music on their image, because there is a portrait picture of each of them on the magazine advert and also a picture of them on their myspace.

We Are Scientists - www.wearescientists.com

I can see from 'We Are Scientists' website, album cover and magazine article that they have used a similar colour scheme and kept the idea of the sword. The sword is their star image motif along with their band logo. They have used 3 main house colours, being red, white and black, and this is one of the rules for albums to use, although they can be broken to achieve a creative effect. These colours stand out really well with each other. Both the magazine advert and the album cover are of the same picture, which is obviously the album cover art. The only difference is that the magazine advert has been stretched and cropped to the album name and artist name. I found that the magazine advert is also on the top of their website and myspace.  They keep the same typography for everything, it is white and the font looks quite posh.

For my artist, I also need to have brand identity which links the music video, website and CD cover. I have thought about what I am going to do for this for quite a long time and written down various ideas. One of my first ideas which I had was to have the colourful lights - which I used in my music video - as the main theme for my brand identity. For my album cover I wanted to create a 'Bokeh effect' so that the lights are blurred/out of focus on a black background and then have a Jack in the Box in front of that, but when I put it together on an image manipulation software it didn't look right. It looked too flat and lacked detail. So for my second idea - which is what I am going to stick with - I have decided to use the theme of cardboard boxes, which relate to the toy boxes that I used in my music video. I want the album cover to look like a cardboard box. Although when it is put in words, it sounds very uninteresting and not very catchy, when it is actually seen it looks a lot better and very catchy. I will be adding various effects to it, and try and link the Jack in the Box to it. I will be explaining this more in the post 'Album Cover (Second Draft)'. I will be using this as a way to identify the artist and it will also be the theme on my website that I will be creating. I will explain how I made the website in the post 'Designing My Website'.

Originally I wanted to have a Jack in the Box as my star image motif (said this in the post for 'Music Video Pitch') but I am finding it difficult to fit in because just a Jack in the Box as an album cover wouldn't really fit in with the artist name or the style of the music. The song is called 'Jack in the Box' because it is what is included in the song, narrowing the toys down to a Jack in the Box. For a Jack in the Box on it's own for both the album cover and website would look a bit tedious and the colours would be too overwhelming. It would also be hard to find a suitable font for the text - for both the album cover and website. I still want to some how incorporate a Jack in the Box into both my website and somewhere in my album cover, maybe it doesn't have to be in the most obvious places.