Party Balloon

Debut Single Artwork - Dead Space Derby

Album artwork for a female rock band's debut single, designed for streaming platforms, social media, and digital advertising.

The Challenge
The artwork needed to capture a song that hides something heavy beneath a bright, upbeat surface - the kind of track that sounds cheerful but speaks to exhaustion and the desire to disappear. It had to work as a small thumbnail on Spotify and as a scroll-stopping image on social, while incorporating the band logo and song title.

My Process

The central image , a woman being carried into the sky by a giant bubble gum balloon, came from that tension between lightness and unease. Bright, almost whimsical, but with an undercurrent of weightlessness that isn't entirely comforting.

In Photoshop, I built the sky by layering and blending multiple cloud images using varied layer modes and masks, softening edges with a low-opacity eraser so the composite reads as a single seamless atmosphere. The woman was isolated via clipping mask and centered as the clear focal point, with the song title set in all-caps behind her so she appears to rise in front of the text. Clouds were then layered in front of and behind every element — balloon, text, logo - so the whole composition feels suspended mid-air rather than assembled in layers.
Typography was clean, elegant, and optimistic - a deliberate contrast to the song's subject matter, mirroring the same irony in the music itself.

The Result
A debut single cover that looked polished and intentional from day one - visually arresting at thumbnail size, on-brand, and quietly unsettling in exactly the right way.