Design for music
I spend a lot of my time working with musicians and the people around them — small labels, managers, venues, promoters — helping shape the visual side of a show, a tour, or a release.
After a song is written, mixed, and mastered, it has to show up in the world somehow. Albums, tours, and merch all live in different places — streaming platforms, vinyl sleeves, posters on a venue wall, shirts someone wears for the next ten years. Ideally all of those pieces feel like they belong to the same world.
My role is to help build that world — visuals that feel honest to the music and cohesive across the many places it shows up.
What I make
Most music projects aren’t just one design problem. They’re a small ecosystem of related things — album covers, packaging, merch, posters, social graphics — all appearing at different moments in a release cycle.
Rather than thinking about these as isolated assets, I try to approach them as parts of a system. Something flexible enough to move between formats while still feeling coherent.
Here are a few of the places that work tends to show up.
Album Artwork & PackagingAlbum art is often someone’s first encounter with a piece of music. Before a note plays, the cover is already setting a tone.
I work with artists on covers and physical packaging for vinyl, tapes, and CDs — things like inserts, lyric sheets, and layout systems — along with the digital artwork that lives on streaming platforms.
The goal is always the same: visuals that feel like they belong to the music, whether they’re seen as a thumbnail on a phone or as a twelve-inch sleeve someone holds in their hands.
Merch SystemsMerch can take a lot of forms — sometimes it’s a single shirt, sometimes as a small collection of related pieces. I think the most successful merch feels like a natural extension of who an artist is.
I help develop merch collections that share a visual language — shirts, hats, totes, stickers, and other small physical objects that fans actually want to live with — or in.
Tour & Show VisualsPosters are cool because they serve two roles at once. They promote the show of course, but they also become souvenirs of it.
I design tour posters, venue posters, and supporting digital graphics that work both as promotion and as artifacts — things that look good online but also hold their own framed or taped to a venue wall.
Artist IdentitiesSome artists benefit from having a visual identity that carries across releases — a consistent approach to typography, color, imagery, and logos that evolves alongside the music.
These systems aren’t meant to lock an artist into a rigid brand. They’re more like a visual vocabulary that can grow and change from project to project while still feeling connected.
Working together
Making visuals for music is an inherently collaborative thing.
The starting point is usually pretty simple: listening. Listening to the music, listening to how an artist talks about it, listening for the emotional center of the project.
From there we start translating that into images—trying things and revising them, letting the visual personality of a project reveal itself. Iteration and conversation is part of the process.
I try to keep the working relationship straightforward and communicative. I know releases and tours run on real timelines, so clear expectations and steady progress matter. The goal is to stay true to what the project is trying to be, while keeping things moving forward.
Let’s work together.
If you’re planning a release, a tour, or a new project and need help shaping the visuals, I’d be glad to hear about it.
Timelines vary depending on the size and shape of things, but it’s always helpful to start the conversation as early as possible. Speaking of helpful: when you reach out, it never hurts to include a rough timeline, a sense of scope, and any music or references you’d like to share.
What happens next?After you send a quick note, I’ll follow up with a few questions. We’ll talk through the idea and determine if it feels like a good fit. If it is, we’ll get cooking.
