James MacKenzie - Album Artwork

This cover was immense craic to create. We took heavy influence from the past, looking through old tune books, old albums and Scottish design from the 40's and 50's. It has to be made plain that we are not playing down the brevity of this heritage in creating this album artwork, simply taking it on board and having some fun with it, whilst doing our best to give a good, respectful nod to people who we took influence from.With these influences in mind we set about getting photos done , after a wee wait for a monstrous, hairy sporran to arrive we set about styling James as a 1950's pipe major. Resplendent in his finely twizeled moustache James rose to the occasion and we had a right laugh getting him looking stern and distinguished. With the photos in the can, my next port of call was to create a nice logotype that reflected our influences, a big bold san-serif was never going to work here and as a general rule these days I hardly ever use a stock font. So this logotype is completely bespoke and one of a kind. Something I had noticed after sifting through the inspiration material we had gathered was that typography and the graphical embellishments of the day were of an exceptional quality. It's a sad reflection on our society that sign writing as it was is no longer considered a valuable artistic asset. Back in the day it was exemplary and the skill and tradition within this genre of design in our country is rich and something to be very proud of.The centre pages went off on a bit of tangent. I had stuck a photo of James playing his flute atop a grand mountain in an ornate frame above a fireplace. I loved this sense of home, belonging and novelty, so I ran with it and ended up constructing either his proud Grannies, or an obsessive fans living room. Complete with tacky scottish ornaments, straw dollies and wally dugs I think it has a good sense of humour, has a pleasant aesthetic and creates a strong conceptual strand throughout the artwork - albeit a bit of a weird one. To say I had fun doing this is an understatement, when clients are up for letting me loose things like this happen and I create something that not only entertains me but hopefully the audience too. I know some people will scoff at this cover for being outlandish, tongue in cheek and quirky but this is nature of art whether be it visual or musical. To create something that some people love you will always create a certain amount of folk who will just plain hate it. This to me does not present a risk, more an opportunity   For someone who actually loves something is far more likely to tell someone else about it, ironically someone who hates something is also more likely to rant to someone about it and this in turn creates a bit of discussion around the whole thing which essential helps to spread word of mouth. In my opinion if you create something that is safe, middle of the road and aimed at pleasing everyone you will essentially fade into the background with all the other mediocrity on show and have nobody either love or hate what you have produced. They will just consume it, shrug their shoulders and move on to the next thing.Any way that's my rant over. You can check out the Music and buy the CD on the website, which I also created...http://jamesmackenzie.com