Emperor Niño (2025)
Album Cover Design, Poster Design, Animation
Emperor Nino is a two-piece rock band from Singapore, and their new album Sedimentary Blues speaks on environmental destruction—what they call "a rock album about rocks."
For the album cover, we took inspiration from the Chuquicamata mines in Chile, the world’s largest open-pit copper mine. The concept was to depict a massive, spiraling mine descending endlessly into the earth. We wanted to evoke the feeling of standing at the edge of collapse—looking into an abyss that grows darker and deeper, a visual metaphor for irreversible damage and decay.
Visually, the design draws from the heavy blacks and bold flat colouring of 90s comic books. The textures are stark and graphic, with textbox shapes repurposed to hold lyrics throughout the album booklet. The palette features earthy browns and oranges for the terrain—evoking dust, rust, and scorched earth—set against an unnatural turquoise sky. \
Building off the album cover, the poster takes inspiration from comic book aesthetics—using panel structures to create a fragmented narrative that mirrors the layers of the earth. The panels reference things like lava, roots, sediment, and rocks, continuing the idea of a world breaking down, shifting, and burning from the inside. Around the image, I created a frame made up of bones, geodes, pipes, rusted cans—this mix of natural and human debris. Heavy blacks and reds were chosen to create something that feels raw and pulsing—like blood, lava, or fire. Something alive, but also unstable.