Logo Design Evaluation

Today, I created a logo on paper for my band and production company. to create my brand identity I used a fairly recognisable font; the fancy looking one in reference to to the Hollywood part, and a more industrial, or rather, urban stencil font for the Undead part. I chose to put the most emphasis on the undead part in reference to one of the bands other songs called 'Undead'.

I will target my audience by creating a visually interesting logo with blood and bold fonts to keep the attenton of the younger

Mr Wynn

Today we had an arranged meeting with Jake Wynn, an established music video director who's worked with big people. He went to a film school in Staffordshire and then went into the business as a runner before becoming an editor and working his way up and building up favours as he went along before being signed up to a major company.

He also told us that when he first started budgets for music videos were much healthier and have gotten increasingly low as the time's gone past.

He taught us that we should have a 'performance bed', one or many long shots of the artist performing rather than only recording what you had planned to be seen. This would mean that when working we would never (in theory) have to get them to perform the song again and you wouldn't run the risk of having gaps between your performance and your narrative. He also said that narrative can be used to hide 'weak spots' in the performance, which I think is a little sneaky.

Blog Update 11/11/10

How did you use your iconography research and web page analysis' to inform your homepage design plans?

When designing my webpage I kept my research and web page analysis in mind by taking features from each. I found that many websites within the genre used a lot of black and darker colours in their designs and often had a sort of grungy quality. I then decided that I should use the same sort of grungy effect as in my digipak to preserve a group iconography between the two. I also included a picture of the 'band' we had created in the two, since many of the other digipaks and websites of groups in the genre had images of their band, I thought it'd be best to do the same in my own.

From the band's current website, I also used the same idea as them by adding a cityscape to the background of my page. Unlike the band's page, however my webpage had the city scape as a combination header and background rather than just a header. I also decided to try and make it fit in more with some of the genre conventions, such as using dark colours and choosing a city at night rather than in the day time like the group's official website does.

When designing my digipak however, I decided to focus more on the masks, as they're quite a big part in the music video and if we were to make more videos then we may not use them again. I also tried to make it rewarding to the people who buy it by having a lot of pictures and making the want to buy it in that way, though it's a bit of a spin on the conventions. As usually there's be more lyrics or something more graphical rather than photos that could be later sold as merchandise if the digipak were limited edition.

Audience Profiling

Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Our audience member is a female who is interested in music and creative hobbies such as photography and dance. They prefer to wear light colours and skinny jeans and enjoy comedy in their films (though they also like horror and action films as well). She likes to listen to indie and rock music genres on the youtube usually and listen to Kiss on the radio.

Results:
We collected our results via our surveys, and after deleting the irrelevant ones we started to analyse the results. We found that 64.4% of our fans were female, and 71.1% of our fans were 17-19. We found that the majority of them are students and 44.4% had creative hobbies 57.8% (as a joint result) said they like to wear skinny jeans and light colours. 71.1% of our fans like comedy films and indie music. 82.2% said they watch their music videos on youtube.

We used Wordle to see which occupation, music genre and radio stations were most popular since the largest word in the image would be the highest percent.

(click to enlarge)

Website Analysis of Hollywood Undead

Website Here

How are web page conventions used?
This website uses all of the website conventions, it has a large banner at the top with the band's logo on it, helping us to understand what we're looking at due to the brand image. It has a collage of many images for the background, again helping to reinforce the band's image since most of the images involve the group in their masks. It also has a working, clear and esay to use navigational bar below the banner, enabling us to navigate the site as we choose via appropriately labled links. The target audience would of course be people who like the group, but could also a appeal to people who'd found the website by chance or out of curiosity. It's use of colours and images leads me to believe that the target audience would be males in their late teens/ early twenties, so around 18-24. The site itself does a fairly good job at advertising the band, though it could make a better use of media such as audio players and perhaps easier to view videos since the current ones are confusing.

The Internet as a Promotional Tool

Benefits:-
Wider audience
Easy to access, can be accessed for anywhere in the world
Can be cheaper
Can notify a lot of information all in one place
Can be a popular place for fans to visit
Viral marketing and messaging spreads quickly
Much more interactive
Use of conventions helps to target the audience

Drawbacks:-
Over-advertising can bring too much traffic
Technology fail.
Complications can be caused, like the internet having problems, disconnected etc.
Not everyone has /knows how to use the internet
Hackers can invade the site and destroy or disrupt information
Lots of useless information on the internet
Trolls can invade the websites and bully, intimidate members

Glossary

I created a tumblr account for my glossary, found in the about section below in the about section ---->

Webpage Analysis

I decided to look at 'Patenbrigade: Wolff''s website for this task, a German industrial trance group. Found here.

It fits in well with most conventions, though most could be improved. Although the website has a banner it's small and if you didn't know the band you wouldn't know what you were looking at since is has no logo or name on it. It also could've placed the navigation bar below the banner so that the text was more visible as currently it's kinda hard to see it. Again with the lay out it gets rather confusing and has a very blog type look to it (Well I guess it is the news page AS WELL AS the homepage) as the majority of the content is just one long stream which can be very confusing for the audience. It does, however, use lots of different media types within this confusing layout, including video, audio and pictures, though they could've been used more effectively.

This leads me to believe that this website is directly aimed at the fans of the band because of the lack of names on the site and that it's aimed at about the 18-25 age range or older, due to the simplistic style kids would find difficult to maintain interest in. IT's also rather aimed at people that spend alot of time on the internet, seeing as one of he first things you see on the page is links to twitter, their blog and youtube.

I think that overall the website's very good at promoting itself, infact,the entire home page is an advertisement for the group's new album which they're letting you download for free now as a sort of viral advertising and this download button is HUGE for a download button, as well as having the most obvious link in the nav-bar is about tour dates.