This was an early double vinyl album for the specialist reissue label Connoisseur issued in 1989. They had been successful with a series of mid-price double compilation albums, even charting a Barry White 2LP set. Mark Stratford had been behind many of these and when I suggested a few ideas he agreed this pairing of two rare session albums at a budget price would do well. The idea was to market it using the names of the musicians involved, so when I cam to put the front cover together I led with the four ex-members of Deep Purple.
Connoisseur had established a house style for this series, mostly white with a central rectangular image, plus their logo top left. I adhered to much of this but extended the grid a bit with logos from the albums and so on which they were happy to allow. For commercial reasons the names of some of the better known musicians were also added to the cover. This was a gatefold release. I did the artwork on art board, and then positioned the images using layout film, which were then scanned at the reproduction house and spliced into the rest of the filmwork. Connoisseur still did hard proofs of their releases at this time on flat card sheets which I still have somewhere.
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