I designed the album cover for a friend of mine who wanted to release his first-ever album on all platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, etc.). The theme of the album was +1/-1, where when you gain something, something is also lost. I was not able to listen to the music to also help with inspiration, but I knew that my friend Kris would put out a very raw and experimental body of music. I knew that he would be coming into the album with a variety of topics, but that he was always going to speak his mind.
I took two portraits of him that he had sent me, and I vectorized them to create the focus of the cover. For the front cover, I had this idea of Kris' soul or spirituality escaping his body. I made a blend of his face to get the gradient of opacity of the soul leaving the body, and he had asked me to add some texture onto the blend. I had everything sorted at that point, but I wasn't such a fan of how hard it was to see the facial features of the blend, so I decided to add a glowing white outline around the face to highlight that part. I made use of vibrant colors to go along with the expressiveness of the album itself.
For the back cover, I was given the track list and was not sure how to make use of the space. I wanted to have some sort of similar element to the front cover, but not as visually stimulating. I decided to take another vector image of Kris to put in the corner, connect the back of the cover with the front, since there was also no text on the front of the cover, as per the request of Kris. I also decided to make the track list more visually stimulating by making it sort of flow or snake down the cover. I included his logo and production credits at the bottom and added the title to the back of the cover. I was very pleased with the end result of this cover because of how well it ended up fitting with the music.
I have attached some imagery that was used in the cover below.
