Cover art and visual identity for “Forward,” Dan Vyne’s debut single, and my first music cover. To judge it the way a listener would, I built a quick Spotify and Apple Music replica in Cursor and tested every version on a real phone. That is what set the final direction.
“Forward,” Dan Vyne. A stamp-framed portrait in a warm amber world, the title widened so it carries from a thumbnail to a billboard.
Cover art and visual identity for “Forward,” Dan Vyne’s debut single. My first music cover.
Everything on the visual side: the concept, the stamp motif, the typography, the grain and colour work, and the final cover. I was also on set helping shoot part of the video.
To judge the cover the way a listener actually would, I built a quick Spotify and Apple Music replica in Cursor and tested every version on a real phone. That test set the final direction.
A single is one square someone sees for a second while scrolling. I wanted “Forward” to land in that second, and still hold up blown across a billboard.
The whole point was the cover next to the music, so here is the track it belongs to. This is the cover doing its real job.
Looking at the cover in Figma was not enough. A client scrolling flat artboards does not experience it the way a listener does on a phone. So I built a rough replica of the Spotify and Apple Music players in Cursor, about twenty minutes of work, where I could swap covers and see them in context. The heavy-grain versions I expected to win looked great in Figma and fell apart on the phone: Spotify adds its own background gradient, and stacked on my grain and the dark border it turned muddy. I dropped the border entirely, and everything sharpened.
Open it on your phone, drop in any image, and watch it become a cover on a real player UI.
Testing the cover with Dan Vyne, dropping versions into the replica on a real phone to see how each one actually felt.