Sonny miles
Sonny Miles is a Hip/Hop/R&B artist in Raleigh, North Carolina. I met him in college, but it wouldn't be until after I had graduated and moved away that we began working together. He wanted a single cover design for his track "Currents", and specifically asked me to reference both Afrofuturism and the 50s and 60s, so I tried to find balance between both the afrofuturistic and the retro.
The above single art pieces are both iterations I proposed during the design process - the one on the left then became an alternative cover, and the one on the right was used as promotional material for Instagram (I like how it looks on the CD cover, though).
"Cheese" was the second single cover I designed for Sonny Miles. This song is about the American dream, and how Miles feels disillusioned by it. He wanted this particular verse to be on the cover, and this was my typographical interpretation - the base colors allude to the US flag colors, and the vague shape of the US is in there too. Sonny Miles' music has a very expressive, groovy tone, so I wanted the type to be handwritten. I felt like anything else would feel too stiff.
"The album art on the left was an initial concept, but the one on the right I designed as a part of my process. I wanted to lay out all the type digitally so I could be sure of the composition, knowing I wanted to go back in and handwrite the words later.
"The last aspect of this extended project was a logo mark for Sonny Miles. He wanted something retro feeling, and I looked at old NASA patches for inspiration. He wanted a variety of palettes, which I show above in the sticker mock-up (that I made myself).
