The best album covers don’t explain the music. They invite you into it.

[DARYL]’s music blended melodic keyboards, angular guitars, and unmistakable new-wave influences with the energy of early-2000s indie rock. Rather than illustrating the songs literally, I looked to the album’s title as the conceptual anchor.

The cover combines original photographs I made of Michael Hayden’s Sky’s the Limit installation at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport with layers of scrambled letterforms inspired by coded communication. Airports are places of constant movement and connection, while the translucent architectural panels felt simultaneously technological and human. Together they became a visual metaphor for information in transit—messages traveling through systems where clarity and noise exist side by side.

The progression from warm orange and red tones on the front to the cooler blue image on the reverse became another part of that narrative. The illuminated panels on the cover carry a quiet sense of surveillance and control, while the single blue panel on the back suggests openness and possibility. Together they create a movement from tension toward release—from messages obscured to moments of clarity.

Like most of the album packaging I created during this period, the project began with a conversation about the band’s music and influences, then quickly moved into making. Working with modest budgets and tight schedules left little room for multiple rounds of exploration, so the strongest ideas often emerged by trusting intuition early. In this case, photography, typography, and metaphor came together to create a visual identity that echoed the mood of the music without attempting to define it.

This project taught me to trust metaphor. Album packaging doesn’t need to explain the music; it needs to create a space where listeners can begin imagining it before the first note plays. Whether designing an album, a book, or a brand, I’m less interested in illustrating an idea than in creating an invitation to experience it.