Evaluation Q2 - Combination of Products

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?



It is important that all of our products work well together as they should essential form a package together. The advertisements and music video are used to promote the digipak, so it is important that the consumer recognises the links between the products. All of the products are essentially also advertising the band as a whole, so maintaining key traits is vital.

Kevin Cummins- Joy Division

We also had to consider Joy Division's existing products, and whether we would re-branding the band in anyway. Though the products are new, that should still work when compared to their original style. We deeply researched photographs of Joy Division, and subsequent releases. Joy Division had a primary photographer, Kevin Cummins, who was behind a lot of the iconic images of the band. The fact they used mainly one photographer meant there were clear links across their work. He was responsible for establishing Joy Division's "look" which was then taken forward by later photographers (and music video makers) like Anton Corbijn. In order to create products which has Cummin's clear influence we used a book which features a collection of his work for the band, simply entitled "Joy Division".




Our Work

The use of black and white was the key thing we used throughout our work. Not just because of the time period, but because of the way it suited the mood of the band, it was something we established as an essential technique from a very early date in the project. Anton Corbijn said of making Control black and white "...my memory of Joy Division is very black and white. If you look at the visuals that are available of Joy Division, especially stills, I would say it’s almost 99% black and white...their record sleeves were black and white, and the way they dressed was quite grey zoned. So, I felt this was the right way to think of Joy Division."(IndieLondon.co.uk). 
Further than just the photography, we stylised the actual graphics of the advert & digipak to also be desaturated. As a tribute to the Ian Curtis biopic Control, on the double page spread edition of the advert we used a pink HMV font. This is the same colour scheme as used for the advertising of that film.

An example of one of our advert developments.

Another key characteristic used frequently was the minimalistic visuals. There is no need for over-using special effects, overlaying multiple layers on Photoshop, or use vast paragraphs of text when it comes to Joy Division. The text and information falls secondary to the actual image and rather than focus on eccentric editing, we felt the cinematography was the most important aspect to get right. A lot of Joy Division's imagery has become iconic due to the art behind it. You could imagine the adverts forming a series of photographs. Taking influence from the digipak release of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, we made sure our album was minimalistic. We avoided the disruption of the barcode, by placing it on a sticker inside. We tried to draw as much attention to the actual photographs as possible. This is most evident on our vinyl edition of The Singles, in which no band name or album name features on the front or back cover. Instead this information was relegated to a small sticker.  We experimented with more complex designs for all our work, but when compared to the branding of Joy Division, and earlier releases by the band, they simple didn't work as a combination.

The same actor features on the digipak and in the music video. This actor is dressed the same throughout all the images. Sharing similarities with the late Ian Curtis, we felt that this protagonist could be potentially iconic. It would also draw clear comparisons between the digipak and the "Disorder" video, meaning that any potential consumers would recognise it instantly.

Likewise the locations featured are the same. We took extreme care when location scouting to find settings which suited the concept and mood of the band. The concept for the video was essentially same as for the album so it made perfect sense to again link the two. This was all part of creating a branding for the new album release. The photographs which feature on the advert are also taken at the same location. We felt these particular set of images linked very strong to classic Joy Division artwork.

We downloaded the font J.D Closer for specific use on our work. As the name suggests this is font that Joy Division used on their second release - Closer. This is the most iconic of Joy Division's logos, so it was something that would help audiences hopefully after being interested in our album, work backwards and buy the original Joy Division releases. The serif font suits Joy Division perfectly, so there was no need to change their original font.


Summary

The release of PlusMinus was met with heavy criticism.

When placed side by side you can see clearly that all our products work very well together. Building up a consistent concept was the key to making them work well together. But much further than that, they also work when placed next to original imagery used by Joy Division. Some of our shots our inter-textual references to their work (such as the bridge scene of the film replicating The Greatest Hits artwork, and the digipak image being a tribute to the iconic shot of Curtis). The locations and buildings used link back to early Joy Division posters, depicting industrial cities and settings. 
We found when researching Joy Division's existing releases that fans had reacted badly to the artwork feature on the collection of 7" vinyls entitled "+-: The Singles". We used the negative feedback attributed to that particular release to drive forward our own work. A lot of the criticism for that album was that the artwork strayed too far away from the Joy Division brand. Whilst maintaining that we were trying to target a youth audience, we felt that this could be done at the same time as making sure our artwork linked to Kevin Cummins' successful work at giving Joy Division an individuality not seen anywhere else in the industry.