Mark Nicholas and his PERVERSIONS

Next week will see the release of a new remix collection from my friend and client Mark Nicholas. His album "Perversions" will feature a selection of tracks from both incarnations of his music; Cosmicity and Mark Nicholas respectively. It also includes some excellent new material.

The design for this album was born of some 3 or 4 initial concepts I did for his review. Mark had pretty much given me the go ahead to do what I liked for this album. At the onset I was going to do something very minimal but the album's title pushed me in other directions. Below are some of the early ideas I generated.





In addition to the above designs was what would come to be the final layout for the album sleeve: a retro-inspired, worn album cover. Because this was a limited pressing, Mark chose to package it in a simple cardboard sleeve. That sleeve lent itself perfectly to a worn LP record sleeve look. In addition I tried to choose imagery and iconography that would contrast "perversions" as much as possible. A homey quilt, retro recording label graphics and layout, etc. I scanned in a number of old record sleeves to obtain some of the "wear and tear" for the design. Here's the final layouts:




This is perhaps one my best album designs to date in my opinion. I really enjoyed how this came together. Certainly the design gift I presented to my friends Peter & Katie Pasque after their wedding was practice for this design. However in this usage, I think the retro-imagery has a new, additional layer of depth to it.