Wayne Shorter Cover Art, Phantom Navigator (CBS Records) 1990
Every few weeks, CBS Records’ art director Tony Lane would ask me to send him a couple of pages of 35mm slides of my personal work. Tony, along with co-art director Nancy Donald, would mock up album covers featuring various images of mine, presenting them to bands like Toto, INXS, Chicago, and, in this case, Wayne Shorter.
Tony believed that this photomontage of a flying Titanic, with its smokestacks painting a beautiful golden fish-scale-like cloud formation, appearing to a little boy lost and alone on the beach at sunset, was the perfect image for Phantom Navigator.
As I recall it, below are Tony's comments on the project.
The first presentation of this illustration drew no interest at all. Tony kept putting it in front of Wayne and his team, but they moved it aside each time. Three months later, Tony made another attempt with a different design, but it was overlooked again. Despite Tony’s insistence, they would just put it aside without really looking. Another three months passed, and Tony called me to say that he was going to present it one more time. He was convinced that this was the right image for the album. This time, instead of directly showing it, he let them explore a selection of images gathered for an alternative presentation. Wayne eventually spotted it and exclaimed, “Why didn’t you show me this one before?” The rest, as they say, is history.
I call this the “Phantom Design” because this scenario is all too familiar both in the process of presentation of a portfolio, sketches, a work selection, and of course in real life.
Have you ever met someone at a party multiple times, you forget their name and face each time, only to eventually reconnect and say, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”—and thus begins a great friendship!
JF
Podevin
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