Aleksandr Shchilkin
Get in touch

Aleksandr Shchilkin

Viewing: Design Lab

shchilkin@gmail.comGitHub (opens in new tab)

Album Cover + Promo Reel

Album cover for Вайбер: pixel Cyrillic type, a rendered phone, and a promo reel built from the same noisy screen world.

Used in the Вайбер promo reel[1] and release hub[2].Track by Вялый Джо.

  • Graphic design
  • Cover artwork
  • Promo reel
  • 3D phone render
  • Screen animation
Final Viber single cover with pixel Cyrillic typography, a retro phone, and saturated glitch colors.

The cover had to do the blunt release work first: name the track, feel loud at feed size, and still leave a trace when it collapsed into a tiny streaming thumbnail. The phone render gave the square a physical object; the browser-built screen motion gave the reel something alive to crop into it.

It sits next to the Animated Chat Screen study: this page covers the cover and promo-world direction, while the companion page isolates the browser animation that became the phone-screen texture.

The title had to win before the noise did.

The release needed a loud digital mood without losing the basic job of a cover: title, object, and instant recognition. I let the surface stay unstable, then held it in place with a rendered phone and oversized pixel type.

Pixel title
Large Cyrillic lettering keeps the track name readable at thumbnail size.
Phone object
The rendered handset gives the square a center of gravity instead of only a texture field.
Glitch surface
Compressed color, scanline energy, and rough edges keep the mood digital without blurring the title.

The handset made the cover feel like a prop, not just a poster.

I rendered the phone separately so angle, reflection, screen treatment, and lighting could keep changing while the cover direction was still moving. The object made the release feel like a small world instead of a flat poster.

The screen surface also created a useful bridge to code. The moving chat scene could be tuned in the browser, captured, and then treated as material inside the rendered phone.

The mood was right; the controls were not.

The generated texture below came after the cover direction. It had the right noisy surface for environment and promo experiments, but it also exposed the control problem: I could not reliably repeat the same crop logic, effect balance, seed, or export size across formats.

That became practical input for Artifact: a small creative web tool for repeatable visual variations instead of starting from scratch every time.

Generated abstract glitch texture with pixel emoji, dark magenta scanlines, and bright vertical streaks.
Generated textureMood, but not enough control.

  1. 01
    Lock the square

    Start with the cover job: title, object, color, and a silhouette that survives small previews.

  2. 02
    Render the handset

    Control camera, light, reflection, and screen material so the phone could carry both the cover and reel.

  3. 03
    Tune the screen

    Build the chat motion in the browser so timing and crop stayed adjustable until capture.

  4. 04
    Keep the friction

    Use the texture-control problem as evidence for a later repeatable visual tool.

  1. v1.1Added

    Context pass

    Added the relationship between the cover, phone render, promo animation, and texture work.

    • Final cover as the lead artifact, with a short account of the release direction.
    • Separated the cover artwork from the companion Animated Chat Screen study.
    • Generated texture as evidence for the later Artifact tool direction.
  2. v1.0Output

    Release visualA five-day cover and promo visual system for Вайбер by Вялый Джо.

    • Square cover artwork with pixel Cyrillic title treatment, rendered phone, and saturated glitch surface.
    • Blender phone scene used as the physical anchor for the cover and reel.
    • Browser-built phone screen animation that could be captured and used as a moving texture.

Release links and companion material.

  1. Вайбер promo reelPublished Instagram reel using the cover world and phone-screen motion.
  2. Вайбер release linksStreaming link hub for the track.