[ANCILLARY PLANNING] The Do's and Don'ts

Just like Camel Wrestling, creating a digipak/magazine advertisement has a lot of do's and don'ts but unlike Camel Wrestling I'm pretty sure no one has decided to blog about them, well at least not in such a unique and interesting bullet point formatted style. So strap on your seat-belts, folks, as we go through the universally, socially accepted rules of making a digipak/magazine advertisement.

Do: 

• Limit yourself to three colours! Make sure they complement each other and that they are visually appealing (so don't bother trying to use feldgrau, Hitler).
• Just like the colours, limit yourself to two fonts! Make sure their not random, they must relate to the artist or their genre somehow, and for the love of god make sure it's readable. Also don't use comic sans because the internet hates it and it's just best to conform to popular opinions, okay?
• Use a good quality image! Unless your product consists of an image of Sandra Bernhard face there is no reason for it to be pixelated to the point of no recognition. Follow the rule of thirds and make sure the image has some sort of connection to the music video, and you're good to go.
• Give us information! Insert the artist and album name somewhere on there. And Barcodes, copyright information, titles, record company logos, websites won't go amiss, so slap them somewhere on the back. 

Nobody asked for this!

Don't:

• Under no circumstances should you insert any type of "effect". I don't care if someone's got a gun to your head and they claim to be serious, no one like's to see that crappy neon glow on anything. It looks unprofessional and will always ruin a good image.
• Don't stretch the image! This is self explanatory and is even taught to children at birth in some European countries. So just don't! 
• Don't place text in front of the artist's face! It'll ruin perfectly good text.

So by the end of this little ride through the exciting do's and don'ts of making a digipak/magazine advertisement your product should no longer look like this:

I don't care how much of a Mike Terry fan you are!

But more like this: 

Wooooooooooh!