The brief for the project was to take inspiration from the original album cover, which was designed by Storm Thorgerson  and go from there.
Nothing too swirly or trippy.
I’m a huge fan of Storm Thorgersons (and Hipgnosis) album covers, as well as Simon and Benji’s music, so I was pretty excited to take on the challenge.

The original cover seems to have someone being swarmed by cherry blossoms. I wasn’t sure if he was being attacked by nature or if nature itself was the vaccine here. My visual response was to take those cherry blossoms and to create a vaccine from them. Not a far stretch really, but I liked the idea.
I wasn’t really good at 3D at this point and had zero skills modeling, but plugged away for ages and came up with what you see to the left. I still rather like it even though I would probably do a few things differently now.

After I had won, I spoke with Benji, and he explained that Simon was quite into old medical equipment (who knew?) and actually had a collection of the stuff. So they wanted to try and photograph some real items and then make a sort of real version of what I had made. The original plan was for them to supply me with the photos and have me make something from that. However, that never manifested and eventually the album came out with their own cover. 
While I rarely toot my own horn, I do like my cover better than what they ultimately went with.

Please feel free to download and use my cover if you like it.