Harry CresswellMore Front-end Bloggersread at source
Designing the Morpho album artwork
Matt and I have been creating artwork for his music for almost 12 years now. It’s a collaboration I’m immensely proud of, and one that offers a welcome change of scene from my day-to-day job of designing and building websites. Morpho , released on Sound Records in November last year, is our most recent project. Our 12th vinyl release and the 1st Matt is releasing using his last name, Benyayer, instead of his pseudonym, Dark Sky. Now, I must admit, I’m no print designer. And, to be clear, this is my one and only what I’d call “graphic design” gig. However, I now find myself in a position where I have a decent amount of experience creating music artwork. More specifically, artwork for records pressed onto 12" vinyl. With that in mind, I figured it might be interesting to share some of the process that went into making the artwork. Planning Projects always start life on WhatsApp, where Matt and I will discuss all sorts of ideas for concepts that somehow resonate with the music Matt has created. For this project, it was important to create something that felt connected to the artwork that we’d already designed for the singles making up the album. A similar vibe, but somehow different at the same time. It had to feel bigger, more impressive, like a season finale. At the start of a new project, Matt creates a shared Google doc, which tends to evolve as we sculpt our rough ideas into a cohesive direction. The document includes the project objective, themes to explore, information that needs to be present on the final product – think track listings, record label logo, catalog ID – and any technical notes that might be useful, such as colour options for the vinyl, who is printing it, and so on. Not a creative brief in the strictest sense, but something not far off. Once we land on a concept that feels right, all other ideas get scrapped. Any references to those ideas get moved to the bottom of the document, for future reference. But, this usually doesn’t happen before we‘ve explored a whole bunch of ideas first. So let’s get into that next. Research Once we have some rough ideas in mind, it’s time to explore them further to see if we can turn any into a solid concept. A large part of that involves going down the rabbit hole, usually online, to research subjects as much as we can. Early in the process we’ll set up a mood board to collect visual references. These might directly relate to a concept, or simply reference a design style or technique that we think could work well and want to try out. Much like the creative brief, we’ll refine the mood board as we start to make sense of our ideas and land on particular concept or direction to explore further. The goal is to get some inspiration for how a concept might translate into something visual. Our wild ideas are usually tamed by what the label is prepared to pay for. No surprises there. So, another important part of our research is to consider what’s possible within the budget, as well as to identify any creative constraints that may cause issues further down the line. We’ll consider print and vinyl pressing techniques, materials we could use, and so on. At this point, we’ll reach out to potential printing partners to discuss our ideas and figure out what’s possible. We’ll also request card stock samples to help us decide on packaging weight and finish. It’s important to get an idea of these things early on. That way we hopefully wont end up designing something that isn’t feasible to create in physical form. Lucky for us, Sound Records had a decent budget and were open to doing something a little different. This gave us a fair amount of creative freedom and presented a good opportunity to work with a laser cutter. We’d been keen on the idea ever since spotting the artwork for Cascade by Bambounouu a few years back. Concept development After pursued a few dead ends, I received the following message from Matt: ”…it could be interesting to look at symmetry in nature and take inspiration from it. Maybe deconstructing and repeating the body parts of a butterfly could be a something to look at. Could be super subtle. Utilise forms found in nature to enhance the function of the design 🤔. Butterflies symbolise transformation and rebirth, which connects to this new project well and the process I’ve gone through moving from Dark Sky to Benyayer.“ This one had promise. We’d worked with symmetry before on Cold Harbour EP . The artwork was based on a photo Matt had taken of Barrier Block , the brutalist style housing estate in Brixton, South London. Exploring symmetry in nature felt like a nice evolution, yet a fun little throwback to 2019, when we created that particular artwork. It also gave us a subtle way to link this new project back to Matt’s earlier work as Dark Sky. The concept felt like a good fit, so we researched it further. Somewhere along the way, this lead us to Belenois aurota , a medium-sized butterfly, also known as the Pioneer White. Two large migrating butterflies followed: Monarch , one of the largest and rarest butterflies seen in here the UK, and Menelaus Blue Morpho , one of the largest butterflies in the world. While the Pioneer and Monarch would steer the rest of the project visually, the Blue Morpho would eventually lead to the album title itself. The Pioneer White, photo by Jaya Shukla The Blue Morpho, photo by Mori M The Monarch, photo by Justin DoCanto Now we had some creative direction, it was time to explore the concept visually, to see what we could create. Design ideation During design ideation, the goal is to figure out how to turn our concept into a piece of artwork. It’s the point we jump into design software, draw on our inspiration, play around with various techniques and create basic mockups to see what we can come up with. For this part, we usually meet up in person to work on the project together. We wanted the artwork to feel alien, like nothing you’ve really seen before. That meant trying not taking the concept too literally. Whatever we ended up creating had to be a subtle abstraction, not immediately obvious. Something to make you pause for a moment, wondering what the hell it is. As with every project, it also had to be appealing to look at. That may sound fairly obvious – it’s a visual artwork after all – but it‘s easy to forget when you’re busy messing about with design software. For every project, we’ll also consider how the artwork will translate into visuals that can be animated. This is important for live shows, social media reels, and so on. Admittedly, this has been an afterthought in the past and a challenge to reverse engineer, so these days we try to account for this early on. With our concept in mind, Matt played around with openart.ai , using it to generating a bunch of new ideas from our visual references. Generated using openart.ai Generated using openart.ai Generated using openart.ai This helped us visualise some interesting, somewhat alien, jellyfish-like looking forms. However, using a butterfly as the source image would often produce results that felt much too literal. Generated using openart.ai Generated using openart.ai Perhaps we didn’t push things far enough with AI. However, ultimately we concluded that although it was an interesting way to brainstorm ideas, it wasn’t a tool we wanted to rely on to produce the final artwork. After some experimentation, we came back to Matt’s initial idea of deconstructing and repeating the body parts of a butterfly. Focusing on the organic shapes found in the wings of the Pioneer White, we created a rough trace in Affinity Designer. The Pioneer White, photo by Divam Suthar Vector trace of butterfly wings Now we had some vector shapes to work with, the next step was to deconstruct them further to create a symmetrical design that felt interesting and a little weird. The process was made much easier once we discovered the symbol tool trick used to create symmetry in Affinity Designer . Your browser does not support the video tag. Soon enough, we realised we were in the process of creating the artwork that would become the laser cut perforations featured on the outer sleeve of the vinyl packaging. We pictured these shapes revealing a graphic on the inner sleeve beneath. This meant we now had to consider an artwork for the inner sleeve itself. Early in the design stage, I’d played around with the idea of a gigantic bitmapped butterfly motif covering the full front and back of the sleeve. Being far from subtle, I’d abandonded the idea. We returned to the idea once we realised the motif would appear more abstract, when folded in half and viewed through the laser cuts, as it would be in its final form. By duplicating a couple of layers, adding a colour overlay, then applying a blend mode, we were able to come up with something that looked much more interesting. Both when seen through the laser cuts, and when the inner sleeve was removed from the outer sleeve altogether. Feeling like we might be on to something, we tried to piece each part together by creating a basic mockup of how the laser cuts might look with the artwork behind. Now it felt like we’re actually getting somewhere. Time to end another late night design session, get some sleep and look at it again another day. Finding the right direction is always a good feeling. You’re on the right track so you can finally let go of all the other ideas taking up mental bandwidth. In our next sessions we could focus on bringing it altogether. Development At this stage, we’ve visually distilled our concept into a clear direction. Now it’s all about developing the final artwork so is ready for production. The first step is to create final digital prototypes. That means creating mockups of the full product packaging. Outer sleeve, with laser cuts and printed elements like track listing and catalogue number on spine. Inner sleeve, on body vinyl labels and the vinyl itself. It’s not about getting it 100% accurate at this point. The goal is to visualise how the final artwork and physical product might eventually look. Then figure out if it works as we’d imagined. One of the harder decisions was whether to cut out the centre of the inner sleeve revealing the vinyl label beneath. This would create an extra challenge, as we then wanted to ensure that the design featured on the vinyl label would line up with the laser cuts on the outer cover. In reality it rarely would, that is unless you replaced the vinyl in its sleeve with perfect alignment and precision. But we wanted to ensure it was, at least, technically possible, to please those like us who obsess over the details. Ultimately we took the risk and decided to go for it. Seeing right the way through to the vinyl from the cover added some extra depth and dimension to the artwork. Given the intricacy of the design, Matt also made a physical prototype for the laser cut cover, using the sample card stock we’d received from the printers. It was important to figure out whether our laser cut design would affect the structural integrity of the outer sleeve. This lead us to remove some of the elements from the final graphic, then space the rest slightly further away from each other, and away from center and the edges. Your browser does not support the video tag. The next step was to turn our digital prototypes into actual deliverables. These are the print-ready files that the printer, and, in this case, laser cutter, can work with. This is the part where we spend way too much time fussing over the details, making sure everything is perfectly aligned and positioned where it should be on templates provided by the printer. To prevent any issues scaling artwork to fit, we always work in design files large enough to translate to 12" vinyl, even during the design ideation stage. Likewise, I’ll always set the colour format in Affinity to CMYK/8 and speak to the printer about what CMYK profile they want me to use. It’s most often Coated FOGRA39 , if that means anything to you. With this set up we shouldn’t have any surprises when the final product returns from the printer. As our design required both laser cutting and printing, we had to split the artwork into four separate files. One file for the laser cut outer. Another for the text and record label logo that would be printed onto the back of the outer sleeve. Then one for the printed inner sleeve. And lastly one more file for the vinyl labels. I like to export and deliver two versions of each file, one with printer guides and one without. That way there’s nothing to dispute later on. I tend to export and deliver all files in TIFF format to prevent any compression, but I know many printers prefer PDF. Production Now we’re at the business end of the project. Time to deliver our print-ready design files for printing and, in this case, laser cutting. The project is out of our hands and down to our chosen partners to turn digital designs into a physical product. My background is in web design. For those that aren’t familiar, it’s an iterative process. We’ll regularly make improvements to a website long after the project goes live. Print design is the complete opposite of that. There’s no room for mistakes and no going back once you’ve delivered artwork ready to be printed. Although there’s a sense of relief that our part is finally over, there’s still that lingering dread that we’ve messed something up and things won’t turn out exactly how we imagined. It’s an anxious wait between delivering the artwork and receiving it back. Fortunately, this time we got everything spot on. Much of that was down to a good amount of patience and two fantastic partners who were happy to answer our barrage of questions. Press on Vinyl did a stellar job on the printing, as did North London Laser on laser cutting the outer sleeve. Unfortunately, we weren’t organised enough to get shots of the print process. But we did manage to get some of the laser cutter in action. Wrapping up Although the progression from concept to artwork might seem fairly linear, I can tell you now, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, designing music artwork is a messy process. At least, it is for us anyway. Until we hit the development and production phases, we tend to move back and forth between stages in no particular order. Often we’ll have an idea for a concept, do some research, mock up some visuals, then scrap the idea altogether and start the process from scratch. Over the years, I don’t think we’ve ever landed on the right concept before we’ve hit a bunch of dead ends first. Things only start coming together once we’ve done this dance at least a handful of times. Usually it’s a simple idea. Something we touched on early on, that needed time, experimentation and going through the motions to reveal itself and materialise. The final artwork is the result of many hours spent playing around with different ideas, parking the ones that aren’t working, then deliberating over where to go next. It takes time and effort to find the right direction. Along with countless emails, WhatsApps, a bunch of late nights, and arguably too much pizza and whisky. The whole project took around 8 months in total. From the moment Matt first briefed me on the project in February 2025, right through to when Matt received the finished physical product in October 2025. It’s hard to say how many hours we actually spent on it. We had the initial concept down within 3 months, but it wasn’t like we were working on it everyday. Often we’ll give it days, sometimes weeks, between design sessions. Giving ideas time and space to evolve seems to be the key. Anyway, we’re both super stoked with how the artwork turned out. A massive thanks to Tom at Sound Records , Antonio at Heartfelt Management , and the folks at both Press on Vinyl and North London Laser , for helping us to bring the project to life and making it happen. I’ve spent this whole time banging on about the Morpho artwork. However, I’d be doing a massive disservice to Matt if I didn’t mention his fantastic music that’s pressed on the vinyl itself. Ultimately, that’s what this project is all about. You can find Morpho on Spotify if you want to give the album a listen. If you’d like to own your own copy and support the project financially, it’s also available to buy directly from Matt’s Bandcamp page , in both digital and physical form.