This was a self-project I did for the purposes of practice in terms of music album design. I decided to do a fan-made cover of a K-pop song called “María” by Hwasa. I felt like the original cover was something I could explore to make my fan made version a bit differentiated and mysterious. I decided then to use two versions of the same cover, one in white, and another in black, and both versions could be used as a physical album or photobook cover, but the black version would be the preference for digital streaming platforms like the example of Spotify.
I wanted to convey something mysterious, a little bit creepy, mature, and quite seductive with this cover, going for a picture and colours that could translate these key words into a concrete piece of design, taking the black and white as neutral contrasting tones and red to give it a color pop to appeal to the eye.
I tried to do different studies which are shown below:
I was inspired by a design trend of using a frame to center the image itself while the outside having nothing or other design elements like text or a background image or such, where the photo is used inside the frame, along with a star on the very center, where is one of her eyes, almost like a evil glow or evil spark on her eye (in red), to translate the mysteriousness and seductiveness I wanted for this. Along with it, I used a marble kind of texture in the background to make the whole cover look chicer and more exquisite, along with texts in red with important information like the name of the album or the singer.
Along with it all, I did some vinyl and digital Spotify mock-ups to test and see how it would all work in the end:
