The title of the album/digipak is ‘MAGIC SHOP’; this is the title of one of the songs in the album. The song ‘Magic Shop’ is about BTS inviting people to their ‘Magic Shop’ and comforting them. I used this narrative lyrics to the concept of the album, and decided to make the digipak like an old book with a fantasy/fairytale theme. I did some research on old book designs and tried to find a similar design for K-POP album. I made a mood board based on my research and identified conventions: curvy corners, serif fonts, pen illustrations etc.

As a start, I made an initial digipak.

I downloaded fantasy font (DS Mysticora), and book corners and edited a digipak with Photoshops. This looked too simple and tedious, so I thought I need a more detailed illustration for the cover.

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These are the second drafts of digipak. I drew an illustration with a pen and scanned them with a scanner. I haven’t thought of what colour to use for the background- for the first one, I downloaded a red leather texture, since old books often used leather textured hardcover. For the second one, I tried purple, since I thought purple has a magical and mystical connotations, which matches with the fantasy concept.

Both of them didn’t looked professional or had a antique mood that I wanted- so, I decided to come back to digipak after I finish the music video. If I make the digipak after the music video, I thought it would be easier for me to create a sense of branding across different products.

For the illustration, to make a link between the music video, I traced an image of Little Red Riding Hood turning around and the illustration of the tree and the stars is based on the setting of the music video. The motion of ‘looking back’ and use of direct mode of address of the character catches view’s attention.

After making the music video and decided to use imagery of the stars and space, I wanted to try out a space footage for the background.

I first tried with a space image with a blue colour scheme. The white of the paper and the black that I filled with a pen lower the production value and made it look less professional. Also, the text looked unfinished in white.

This is my final digipak of the cover and the back. I added a metallic texture to the text, as it looked unfinished for the draft right before. I used a different space image with purple colour scheme. I went back to the idea that I had for the second draft- purple has connotations of magic and mystery, which is the concept of this album. Also, purple has long been associated with wealth and royalty and I wanted BTS to have a higher quality, luxurious and well-educated image.

Also, I reedited the scanned illustration and didn’t erase the white lines of the Keltic curves, since without the white, it looked unprofessional and low quality. Instead of the moon on the top of the cover, I made a logo of BTS and put on the centre top. This will create a sense of branding as I’m going to use this logo several times throughout this music promotion, for different products.

I added a barcode on the corner of the backside and put a logo of the distribution company and the agency of BTS. This is a convention of a digipak to have logos of the companies that produces the album.

I put a quote from BTS’s ‘Magic Shop’ like a book. This is unconventional for a digipak, however, I thought this represents their values and beliefs.

I had some technical issues of having low quality, pixelated image. So, I went to the image size and changed the PPI pixels per inch from 72 to 300 DPI / PPI.

Inside the digipak, I put a tracklist, a CD and a lyrics of the lead single (‘Mikrokosmos’). As it is an ‘old book’, I downloaded a old paper texture image and put it as a background for the inside contents of the digipak.

For the tracklist, to continue the concept of a book, I made it like a chapter page on the introduction. The songs are listed with the title, the artist and the producers as chapters.

This is the first draft of the tracklist and it looked a bit blank, so I added curvy corners, a logo and more informations about the song (list of producer names of the song).

For the CD and the lyrics page, as my digipak is unique, compared to digipaks for other genres, I referred to K-POP digipaks and how they put a CD. Conventionally, digipaks are in a plastic case and there’s a jewel case that holds the CD. However, for K-POP digipaks, since all of them have unique designs that matches with their concept, there’re lots of digipaks that just have a ‘slip-in’ type, so a sleeve can hold the CD.

This is the first draft of the CD and lyrics page. I put the logo of BTS and their agency and the distribution company on the CD. The same font (Attic) has been used for the lyrics and the title on the CD. I put a short quote from the book, “Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart” on the sleeve for the CD, which is the book inspired the lyrics of ‘Magic Shop’ and the concept of this digipak.

Again, it looked too black, so I added the illustration of the cover and tree illustration that I used for the website of BTS. By repetition of the same image, the audience will recognise the brand image of BTS easily.