The Choice Music Awards is an annual celebration of the best Irish albums. We delve a little deeper to discover the story behind the album artwork chosen by some of the contenders and its relationship to the music in question.
Singer/songwriter Mick Flannery and graphic designer Matt “Punchy” McQuaid talk about the process of creating the cover for Flannery’s self-titled sixth album.
Mick Flannery: I’m dependably useless when it comes to visual ideas. I was very hands-off for this end of things. In the end I was happy that the cover represented the idea of different sides of the one “self”. Though I’m not a big fan of looking at my own face.
Matt McQuaid: We went through dozens of designs! The final cover was one of the first ideas, the second one to be exact. Then there was variations on that and just the single photo of Mick, which is one third of what ended up being the final cover. Then we tried some different photos and some more traditional designs, 70s singer-songwriter stuff: earth tones, framed photo, big serif fonts. It was like stumbling through the dark, both artistically and technically speaking, but it came back around full circle to that second idea.
Words: Jack O’Higgins
