Communication is a Virus

I really enjoyed this brief, I normally approach collabaritive work because I've been known to be quite a control freak in the past - but I think I managed to put that aside.
I was working with Ed, who was very motivated and driven, yet very laid back at the same time. It was good working with him for this reason as sometimes I get really stressed over work but because Ed is always so level-headed and pretty happy-go-lucky (no offence Ed, thats a compliment!) it really made me wonder why I get so worked up in the first place.

Anyway... we chose 'get people to try something new' as it was very open, we thought this was a good choice as any of the other categories would fit under it - so why choose any of the others and limit yourself?

I think we had a really good oppurtunity to do something fun and enjoy ourselves and I think we naturally went in the direction of choosing something that we both enjoyed and had in common, music.
Our first idea was to try and get people to try new types of music, but why? We needed a reason, so we researched into music corporations and how they scam the artists on their labels, so we went along the lines of promoting independent music in Leeds specifically because we could actually promote it then.
Ed did some great context research and went out to a couple of places, taking photos of potential places we could promote our music. This would target our audience of people involved in the 'indipendent music scene' who would pick up a demo CD containing tracks from indipendent artists and then pass it on to, or make a copy (due to the tracks having no copyright) for their friends who listen to mainstream music.

I e-mailed loads of indie bands asking if we could feature their music on our disc and got loads of positive replies.

After swapping briefs with Ollie, Liam and Emma they refined our brief to only electro music. This posed a bit of a problem as all of the replies I had received up till then were from indie bands... so I spent another couple of hours e-mailing electro groups in Leeds. Fun times!
They did give us a really cool name though, 'Hidden Tracks' which is edgy and also sums up the purpose of our work.

We both then worked ont he designs, I came up with these:

And Ed made a couple of variations along the lines of this:

We both preferred the look of Ed's - it had that really gritty cheaply-made design that most guerilla-style CD packaging had.

We worked on a few designs and here are the illustrator files that we used for our presentation boards to display how it works. (The colour is diffirent because when its printed on brown stock it darkens)

Front of CD

Back of CD

As you can tell there is in inlay, when you pull it out the side of the sleeve the track names are revelead through a hole cut out the back of it.

We needed a few images of it operating in context, so we went to the shops we had identified as potential distributors of the CD and asked them if we could take a few photos of the CD at points in the shop where similar material is displayed... most of them said yes.

Ed had gotten to know the manager of White Label Clothing and he said he would be willing to distribute our CD if it were an actual product - so if we wanted to, we could actually have a real crack at this and see if it would work!

One more thing, we also created a Myspace page to serve as a community where people can discuss independent electro music in Leeds and listen to tracks that would be featured on the disc (we got permission from the artists before uploading the tracks): heres the link:

http://www.myspace.com/hiddentracksleeds