GUILTY ALBUM COVER DESIGN

Guilty was album 75 in an ongoing collaboration with Sara Garad-Cole at Universal Music’s VOLTA trailer and promo music label, which grew to more than 100 album covers. Sara provided references drawing on dark romanticism, couture and the sculptural use of feathers, which became the starting point for the album’s imagery.

The music moves between drama, tension and emotional intensity. The challenge was to interpret those references as an image that captured those qualities while still functioning as a distinctive album cover within the established VOLTA catalogue. I built the artwork around a symmetrical winged structure, combining digitally sculpted forms with layered feathers to give the image a sense of beauty, menace and scale. Restrained lighting picks out the edges and details while allowing much of the structure to disappear into black.

The artwork was deliberately created as a wide panoramic image, giving the label flexibility beyond the square album cover. The extended composition could be cropped and adapted across promotional artwork, digital campaign material and online release platforms while retaining the same central visual identity.