YouTube Music Covers

Embark on a visually stimulating journey of my YouTube Music Covers career (so far). I've handpicked a couple of my favourite playlist cover designs and explained my thought process with some concepts and final results with links. I've been working with them for a couple of years and have been meaning to share the work, but I felt that it wasn't enough... I'm ready to share.

Enjoy the gallery!

Credits: Creative Director: Dan Cavicchia Graphic Designer: Sultan Jumataev (me) Assistant Graphic Designer: Paulina Laroya Assistant Graphic Designer: Henrique Fonseca

Collection of the current Sub Condiment YouTube playlist. Images are collected throughout the years, they are generated by YouTube.

Sub Condiment was one of my earliest works at the YouTube Music company. Initially, I created a lot of different concept designs that revolved around a 'play' button and the playlist back then was for "Pon Reggaeton". Later on these concepts ended up getting recycled for other covers, but never ended up going live.

Early explorations and an obvious typo that neither I nor my creative director noticed haha

Early explorations and an obvious typo that neither I nor my creative director noticed haha

Some of the early concepts below of my explorations of YoutTube Music. Back then, I didn't really know what I was making, or if they were going to use artists' pictures, so I focused on icons, typography and textures. They loved these explorations and picked some to explore for other covers like Modo Diablo and Flow Urbano.

As I'm putting this together, it's insane how much work goes into one cover, so many versions, concepts, and iterations and in the end, many of them don't make it. Crazy!

Early works with YouTube exploring a play button-styled text

Glow and On Fleek Playlists

Glow playlist cover was developed from another concept called 'On Fleek', where I had a glowy spray-painted effect. On the left, it's an exploration of multiple different handwritings mixed with some Texturelabs Spray Effects and textures.

The project started as 'On Fleek' playlist but the name was changed during the production

Caramelo Playlist

In the Caramelo playlist, I focused on 3 different typographic styles, handwriting it. Concepts are on the left, and live covers are on the right.

Groove City Playlist

One of my favourite covers that unfortunately has not been green-lit. I created 3 separate covers and one of them being an illustration where the main artist will go in the center of the circle. It was beautiful, I love clouds. The idea behind it was to highlight how chill and nice this playlist is.

Anime Hotlist Covers

After the Groove City playlist, seeing my potential for illustrations, I was tasked to create an illustration for an Anime Hotlist playlist. The idea was to feature any characters resembling anime showcasing the YouTube logo. Here are the final results and early concepts below:

The idea was to showcase YouTube stickers on the faces of the characters, but it was adjusted as we developed the illustration and only kept it in the eyes. The character's head on the right side is supposed to be a 'play' shape within the YouTube logo. I thought I was clever with that one haha.

Various Korean Playlist Covers

This playlist project spanned over a month and I created a lot of different concepts, to the point I was burning out and needed additional support. This is where I've Paulina @laro.pau and Henrique @porke.design to assist me with some of these covers. There have been so many of them (and by that I mean 100s of concepts), so I decided to show the final results:

I want to show these additional concepts for the Fun On playlist. My creative director fought hard to keep these, but it didn't work out. Which is a shame because it took me so long to develop this neon glassy look with later custom-made and handwritten typefaces. Then, not even a week later Texturelabs made an amazing tutorial on how to make the neon effect with an action... haha

Various German Playlist Covers

Some of my early works with YouTube Music where I created simple minimalistic German playlist covers, then slowly transcended into maximalism of type design, as I found my style.

Another big project where the Creative Director had asked me to generate some ideas for the...decade! The task was to generate a playlist template highlighting any genre of music that is eye-catching and easy to replicate for the in-house team. This time again, I've hired Henrique @porke.design to help me with some of the concepts. After a couple of weeks of work, they selected Henrique's design and it was featured throughout the YouTube Music app. More of it on his website or you could also google Decades YouTube Music Playlists, here's one of the examples, Dance Anthem, and here's another one, Pop's BIggest Hits.

Some of the early concepts for the Decades playlist covers

If you have gone through every single piece and read through every single word....wow. You are part of my life now. Thank you so much for reading, watching, and waiting for the images to load because the 2023 internet is still somehow too slow and computers can't handle lots of images for some reason (?).

Thank you!

GEO