Mac MacLaren – Mr. Wildflower album art

Mr. Wildflower is the debut album from Canadian musician and visual artist Mac MacLaren, announced on December 1, 2023, and released independently on March 1, 2024.

The album design is by Mac MacLaren, with photography by Tyler Gardiner. The album art prominently features text set in Raphaël Bastide and Jérémy Landes’ Fungal in various growth-affected styles. Fungal, based on Bistream DejaVu, was a challenge given to Landes from Bastide to “make a typeface rot and ferment” (Studio Triple). This rotting growth affect was used in the album’s artwork to symbolize memory loss by demonstrating a progressively worsening text legibility as the album’s written story progresses. This is featured most noticeably on the back of the Wildflower Gazette vinyl insert, where the story becomes nearly illegible mirroring the titular character’s decent into a dementia-fueled haze.

Several fonts from the last century and older make an appearance in the Wildflower Gazette vinyl insert in an homage to dense information-packed periodicals of these older periods. These various typefaces are mostly digitizations by Dick Pape based on the originals, including Via Face Don (circa 1977) by Hans Donner and Sylvia Trenker, Frankfurter (1970) by Bob Newman and its copy Rock Opera (circa 1974), Tuscan Italian (1853) by Jordan Davies, Futura Licht (1931) by Paul Renner and Pluto issued by Face Photosetting in 1969. Picnic by Mariel·le Nils and Adelphe by Eugénie Bidaut are also featured.

I created a hand-cut linocut design with a W initial based on Arnold Böcklin for the second vinyl insert and album promotional poster. I transferred the letter to the block directly from my scan of the typeface which inadvertently mirrored the letter, and luckily since its only a W it’s not a noticeable mistake!