Text on album covers is tacky? Whatever 🤌🏼 Vienna Starlight Boom 😒

Typography can ABSOLUTELY make an album cover.

During the pandemic, I got obsessed with album cover design. I'd spend hours looking at covers, researching the designers behind them, and trying to understand the decisions and creative processes that made them work.

It was one of those design rabbit holes I could never get tired of. 💀

I'm bringing that interest back with a new cover inspired by the music I love, including Neil Young's Harvest, Bandalos Chinos' Paranoia Pop and Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats' Vol. 1.

Looking at these alongside other great album covers, one thing stands out: typography CAN be the image!

I took inspiration and designed one as well!

What's an album cover where the typography is impossible to separate from the artwork? Show me your favorites.

Reid Miles' Blue Note covers are my pick, where the cropped oversized lettering carries as much mood as any photo could. Your Paranoia Pop treatment has that quality too, the letterforms feel poured into the image rather than placed on it.

DockTail approached me with a fun idea: make us look nothing like what we do.

As strange as it sounds, I think this is one of the most exciting creative challenges. When branding a business, the primary objective is usually to communicate what it does. But what happens when you deliberately take that away?

After a few days of brainstorming, experimentation, and using Curative Intelligence, I arrived at these two concepts.

One is ALL CAPS, the other is all lowercase. Both carry the same personality, but express it through two entirely different approaches.

Now I'm curious: Which one do you like more?

Second one!!