The first digipak I'm going to analyse is "Reckless" by Bryan Adams. I feel this is relevant as Bryan Adams is our chosen artist and "Reckless" is the album our chosen song "Summer of 69" is from.
The front cover fits some generic conventions of a rock digipak, for example the colour scheme, is predominantly a mix of grey, black and white. This fits the convention of a rock digipak's colour scheme involving no more than three colours. Another convention the front cover fits is that the main image of the album cover is a photo of the artist, this is especially true with solo artists such as Bryan Adams. What is also conventional about the image is the type of photo and the colours used as well as the artist's body language. His body language is conventional as he comes across as confident and self assured, this along with the artist's determined facial expression, gives the impression of someone who is serious about what he's doing. However because of the photo's colour scheme and how the bottom half of his face is slightly blacked out to me symbolises that he wants people to focus on the music not him. trying to draw attention away from his faced a recurring theme in Bryan Adams digipaks, for example on the digipak for his album "Best of me" the image is in black and white and only of the top half of his face and head.
The font however doesn't follow generic conventions as conventionally on a rock digipak the name of the artist is the biggest text on the cover with the album's title being smaller. An example of this is the Nickelback album "Dark Horse". One convention the front cover of "Reckless" does follow is the positioning of the text as conventionally the album's name is underneath the name of the artist.
The back cover of the digipak also follows some of the generic conventions of a rock digipak, for example it has the same font and colour scheme as the front cover, white font, black background. Another convention that the back cover follows is the inclusion of copyright information and a record label logo which in this case is A&M
One convention that the "Reckless" back cover doesn't follow is that the background is plain black, whereas often there is another image of the artist or a piece of orginal artwork that is relevant to the band or album. However I feel the reason "Reckless" doesn't follow this convention is so it can continue the theme of not distracting people from the music with things like extra artwork or images of Bryan Adams. An example of a digipak that does follow this convention is "Lost highway" by Bon Jovi.
Similarly the spine of the digipak also follows the generic rock conventions of a simple colour scheme, which again is black background and a white font for the text. Also just like on the front cover the spine of the digipak breaks the convention regarding text on the digipak because once again both the names of the artist and the album are the same size text, rather than the artist's name being bigger.
In regards to the inside panels the conventional colour scheme(grey, black and white) is again continued, to the point where it was even used on the CD itself in some releases.
Another convention of the rock Digipak "Reckless" follows is to have the song lyrics included within the digipak along with the CD. Although it is a generic convention I feel including the lyrics also links in with the digipak's theme of wanting to focus on the music because by including them it means people can learn the song and spread it via word of mouth and potentially increasing album sales. But also having the lyrics there also mean that thier more open to interpretation from the listiener and by extension more artistic.
