Lopez

For our final project, we had to design a new vinyl cover for an artist we liked. I chose Joji’s Smithereens. I love the music, but the original cover was just a plain blue gradient and felt like it had so much more potential. I wanted to explore how I would reimagine it.

Typography is something I’m really passionate about and constantly working to improve. For this project, I paired it with hand-drawn ink and graphite illustrations to match the emotional tone of the album. The drawings took weeks to finish, and I even created a custom font for the track titles because using a standard typeface just didn’t feel right alongside my illustrations.

While I loved making the drawings, scanning them into Photoshop and transferring them to Illustrator was a hassle. Some sketches didn’t hold up digitally, so I had to redo them. Still, I enjoy the challenge of blending traditional and digital. It pushes me to learn and refine my skills.

The album has a depressing, heartbroken vibe, so I illustrated a man in graphite losing his head after seeing a couple in the distance. On the back, there’s a single man sitting at the edge of a cliff. The overall design is simple but meant to hit an emotional feeling that people can relate to. Overall, this was one of my favorite projects I've worked on.