Welcome to PLAY.LISTCOVERS
What the heck is this thing?
I’m a graphic designer located somewhere in the currently frozen wastes of Kentucky. I’ve been doing some version of this since c. 1987.
About this project
PLAY.LISTCOVERS is a little pet project. I enjoy making custom covers for my Apple Music playlists.I decided to make a place where I can share them myself instead of toss them into the void of social media. Seems like a nice place to share whatever weird songs are on repeat while I work.
This is primarily a creative exercise and for my own enjoyment. As such they’re free to use for your purposes. I do include a link to my Ko-fi account (see below) so if you like something please consider tossing me a few duckets. If you want something custom, from a human, for your playlist or podcast…let’s talk.
What to expect here. Primarily, just unique images you can use for your custom playlists in Apple Music, Spotify, and anywhere else that allows. I’ll also drop in whatever weird playlist I put together that interests me for the time being. Of course I will use that opportunity to highlight the PLAY.LISTCOVER I use for that playlist. You’ll also see what song is living in my head rent free and finds itself on repeat. Maybe we can an occasional album art review or discussion, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
More about me
I’ve been creating digital art since around 1988. Those were obviously early days. Photoshop may not have even had its first birthday yet. I was working with Paintworks Pro for the Apple IIgs, and desperate to get my hands on Paintworks Gold. I’d spend my time deconstructing sports logos from baseball cards, and meticulously recreating pixel perfect scenes from video games paused on a CRT TV.
Heading into the 1990s I would become obsessed with David Carson’s work on Raygun Magazine. I would apply what I was learning there to create desktop wallpaper for everyone’s pet interests. Everything from video games, classic sports, NASCAR, bourbon to comic book characters and bands. Those probably exist on several floppy disks I refuse to throw away, despite currently having no way of reading them. The ancient days of 640 x 480 resolution.
In the time of mobile phones I was considerably less interested in these pursuits. Adobe’s ridiculous subscription model certainly didn’t help. In this time period I was asked to provide some album art for several podcasts and other similar projects. During this time I eventually learned I could make custom artwork for my playlists. As we moved into the streaming era I did less and less of that, but now I’m bringing it back with what I hope is just a fun creative exercise to keep adding pieces here and writing about the process.