Cover art and visual identity for a debut single.
“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.
I was involved with “Forward” from the very beginning. I was on set helping shoot part of the video, watching this guy quietly do almost everything himself: recording in the studio, planning the shots, editing the footage, refining the mix. It was his first release, no label machine behind it, just one person trying to get it into the world. That is the same perseverant energy I have had on my own first projects, the feeling that you do not fully know what you are doing yet but you care too much to let it be half baked. I wanted to help, and for me that meant designing a cover that did justice to how personal this first release was for him.
Whenever I get spare pockets of time I fall into visual references: Pinterest, Muzli, Awwwards, random branding blogs, any corner of the internet where visual design lives. Over years I have built a long list of saved links and screenshots. When the song came up I went back to that archive, and a few directions clicked with the mood of “Forward.” I pulled those into a moodboard and shaped the direction from there.
The stamp edge came from a personal place. As a kid I used to notice the tiny illustrations inside stamps, small self-contained worlds, and that perforated edge always felt like it had a job to do. There was also a metaphor that fit: a stamp is what you put on a letter to send it forward, to carry a message to someone. The song is literally about moving forward together and carrying that message, so a small image framed like a letter felt aligned.
It was practical too. The source photo was shot in the dark with a bit of blur, and I could not do heavy manipulation without breaking the authenticity of the portrait. A subtle stamped border added character without dumping extra elements on top. And it could scale: keep the outer frame consistent, keep changing the internal imagery, and future releases would still feel related.
This was my first cover, so I started with the basics: what dimensions do the platforms want? Everything pointed to a 1:1 square at 3000 × 3000 px. That size works as a master because platforms downscale but do not upscale, so a smaller file would look soft on high-resolution screens. I also learned about safe zones, keeping roughly 150 to 300 px of padding off the edges. It sounds dry, but it quietly shaped a lot: how big the type could go, where the stamp border sat, how close his face could get to the crop.
Covers are mostly experienced as tiny thumbnails, scrolled past in milliseconds, so there is not much room for a complex visual story. Most of the feeling comes from two levers: minimal image manipulation, and typography. “Forward” sits in a mix of movement, vulnerability, and a dark, intimate portrait. The lyrics are addressed to a woman, a sense of reaching out and asking someone to move forward with you. I wanted the type to hold that tension: forward but not loud, emotional but not melodramatic, dark but not heavy. So I spent a long time playing with fonts, weights, and compositions until the title felt like an extension of his voice.
While I was still undecided on colour, I leaned into the night mood already in the photo. The original had visible grain, almost like it was shot on Fujifilm. Adding more grain on top can be risky, but it is a very current language in music and photography. I wrapped a dark, cinematic gradient around the portrait and blended a grain overlay, and it pushed the cover into a more atmospheric, filmic space. Seeing colour and black-and-white side by side showed me how much mood comes from tiny shifts in hue and contrast, especially knowing the image would be compressed down to a small square.
I also wanted to see how generative AI could help me explore faster. I found references that matched what I had in mind, grainy portraits, motion trails, light leaks, and used AI to translate the vibe in my head into quick options on screen instead of compositing every frame by hand. This was not outsourcing the design, more like a helper to rough out ideas. I played with hue, light leaks, long exposures, motion trails, textures, heavy grain, and dust. Some went nowhere. Others gave me small surprises I refined manually. The real value was speed: test several directions quickly, then keep the ones that still felt honest to the artist and the song.
This was probably the most important part. 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 both players in Cursor, functional within twenty to thirty minutes, where I could swap covers and view them in context. That is where it got real. Of the eighteen-odd variations I was testing, the heavy-grain ones looked great in Figma and I expected them to win. On the phone they fell apart: Spotify and Apple add their own background gradients, and combined with my grain, the dark borders, and the image texture it became too heavy and messy. I would not have caught that without the prototype. I removed the black borders entirely, and that one change cleaned everything up.
Looking back, I was not just making something that looks cool. I was slowly learning how people who design music covers actually think.
Before grids or type scales, I answered one question: what should Forward feel like if someone sees it for a single second as a thumbnail? Warmth, motion, a quiet moment still moving forward. Once that was clear, colour and composition stopped being random.
It was tempting to pile on effects because it was a debut cover. The strongest versions kept coming back to a few elements: one portrait, one colour world, one type system, one idea of motion. Every pass asked what I could remove and still hold the core.
The cover lives as a full canvas in Figma, a tiny square on a phone, and a glance from meters away on a billboard or tram. Testing it across those forced the wider tracking and the simpler border. They made practical sense, not just aesthetic sense.
The stamp frame became a small, repeatable hook. I liked the idea that someone could sketch this cover roughly from memory: a framed portrait, a warm orange world, a soft sense of motion.
From the outside the final cover looks simple. Inside Figma it was twenty passes of tiny variations. Generative AI helped me explore faster, but the real work was editing: choosing what still felt honest to the song, and discarding what was just visual noise. Less about chasing one perfect idea, more about protecting a clear, small one across every format it needs to live in.