Almost There EP

Portfolio Case Study | RFL Design Corp

Client: AKila K & E. Nigma

Project: Creative direction: Album cover, single covers, merch, promo graphics.

Year: 2026

Role: Creative Director

Category: Music Campaign, Album Art, Merch Design, Creative Direction

The Story

E. Nigma and AKila K came to me with a fully recorded EP called Almost There. They needed a visual campaign including album cover, three single covers, merch artwork, and promotional graphics for social and digital. Every piece had to feel like it belonged to the same world.

The visual direction was rooted in real New York. Subway culture, graffiti influence, sports team references, Penn Station signage, 1990s Grand Central energy. The kind of New York you know if you've lived here, not the skyline-on-a-poster version.

I ran this through the full three-phase Discovery Method:

Phase 1: discovery and creative direction. Understanding the artists, the album's narrative arc, how the visual system needed to support the music without competing with it.

Phase 2: artwork design. The album cover and three single covers for "aNYtime, aNYwhere," "Luxury," and "What ya Heard (YERRRRR)."

Phase 3: merch and promotional materials. Two shirt designs and five social assets timed to the rollout.

Music campaigns require every piece to work independently and as part of the set. A single cover needs to stand alone on Spotify. The same visual language needs to feel cohesive when all four covers sit together. The merch needs to work on a body, in a photo, and as a thumbnail. One visual system, six different contexts.

What Happened

The full campaign delivered on time and on scope. The visual system held across every format: streaming platforms, social, physical merch, and promo. E. Nigma's appearance on @afterhourshow wearing REFiL merch created organic cross-brand visibility between the project and my own brand — an unplanned outcome that validated the cultural overlap between the audience I design for and the audience I sell to.

The Lesson

This was the first fully documented campaign with a signed SOW on file. It's also the project that proved the Discovery Method scales beyond brand identity into full creative direction. The same process: listen, brief, design and refine applies whether you're building a logo system or a 12-deliverable music campaign. The medium doesn't change the discipline.