Client · 2021–2023
Leah Kate
Album artwork for a record that had to work at 3000px and at 40.
Cover artwork and art direction
Four covers.
Four formats.
An EP, two singles and a double feature. 2021 to 2023.
What Just Happened?
The first body of work rather than another single, so it had to feel like somewhere you go instead of something you hear once.
An airbrushed sky, a heart drawn into the haze, and her own shadow thrown across it. The title is painted into the sky instead of set on top of it — it fogs at the edges like everything else in the picture, so it reads as a thought rather than a label. The EP badge and the advisory sticker stay, because those are the marks that tell you this is a record.
Shit Show
A bedroom at full saturation: red, hot pink, a corded phone, a deck of cards thrown across the sheets. Shot upside down, which is the joke and the title at the same time.
Two lockups, two jobs. A gold script carries the name the way a perfume ad would, and underneath it an acid-yellow display cut has been stretched until the letters are coming apart. The type is doing what the song says.
Dear Denny
The one that goes quiet. Near black, on-camera flash, red tartan and fishnets, hair over the face — a picture that looks found rather than produced.
One piece of type does everything: a glossy red script, high contrast, set large across the middle, with Starring Leah Kate underneath in a small serif. It is a film poster, and the credit block is the thing that makes it one.
Unbreakup / Brainwash
Two songs on one sleeve, so the sleeve had to be packaging rather than a picture.
A magenta header bar carries the release the way a video sleeve carries its spine: artist, side A, side B, the name of the series. Halftone dots for a ground, outlined bubble caps for the two titles, and a circular inset for the second side. Everything on it is a label, and the labels are the design.
Play both sides.
Cover artwork and art direction: Ameer Al-Ayyash. Photography, styling and music by their respective teams — the covers are shown as released.
The brief.
Four releases in two years for an artist whose whole subject is the part that comes after. A cover is chosen at the size of a thumbnail, in a feed, beside everything else that came out that week — and then it is lived with at the size of a record. Each of these had to survive being sixty pixels wide and still hold up at full size.
They are deliberately not a set. An artist with one look has one mood, and these records go from an airbrushed daydream to a bedroom at full volume to a film poster to a double feature. What holds them together is not a palette, it is a discipline: each cover picks one format and commits to it completely, down to the badges and the credit block.
Type does the work. Every cover has two lockups doing different jobs — a script that carries the voice and a display cut that carries the volume — and on every one of them the type is set into the photograph rather than laid over it. It fogs with the airbrush, it stretches with the joke, it glosses like the flash.
Colour is how they are told apart at thumbnail size. Lilac chrome, acid yellow on hot pink, red on near-black, magenta on halftone yellow. Four covers, four colours you could name from across a room, none of them borrowed from another.
The photograph is always the subject and the type never apologises for sitting on it. Nothing is centred out of habit: the title goes where the picture leaves room for it, which is why the wordmark sits low on one cover, across the middle of the next and inside a header bar on the last.
An EP, two singles and a double feature for a pop artist whose whole subject is the part that comes after. Four covers that refuse to look like a set.
- Client
- Leah Kate
- Role
- Cover artwork and art direction
- Year
- 2021–2023
- Disciplines
- Cover artwork, Art direction, Typography, Image treatment
- Tools
- Photoshop, Illustrator
Next project
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