Hundreds of covers: how I try to make them belong together without boring anyone

Every single needs a cover. With 273 singles out, the maths is simple and a little overwhelming. I'm the art director of everything that leaves my label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS, so every one of those images has passed through my hands. Some I still love. Others I'd change tomorrow. And there are a few that, honestly, I don't remember approving, which tells you something about the volume.

I want to explain how I think about covers, because it's a problem anyone who makes a lot of work runs into: how do you make everything look like it came from the same person without each piece being a photocopy of the last?

The real size of a cover

The first thing I learnt is that a cover is almost never seen big. I design it on a wide screen, look at it up close, fuss over the details. Then people see it on their phone, in a list, the size of a fingernail. There, the details vanish. What's left is a smudge of colour and, with luck, a shape.

That changed the way I work. Now, before I sign off on a cover, I shrink it until it's tiny and ask myself whether it still stands apart from the one next to it. If it doesn't, I go back. A gorgeous cover that blurs into forty others in a list is no use to me.

That test has made me give up ideas I adored. Busy compositions, small lettering, visual games that only worked up close. It hurt. But the cover isn't there for me to enjoy on my laptop.

To keep things coherent, I decided some elements would never move. I won't hand over the exact recipe, partly because I've kept adjusting it and partly because I'd rather it showed without being explained. But the idea is simple: a few things that always repeat, and everything else free.

Repeat too much and the catalogue turns into wallpaper. All the same, nothing stands out. Repeat nothing and every song looks like it's by a different artist, and nobody builds a picture of you. Between those two extremes there's a narrow strip, and I've spent two years moving around inside it, sometimes drifting one way, sometimes the other.

I'll admit I haven't always got it right. There were seasons when the covers looked too alike, and I myself, scrolling my own profile on a platform, couldn't tell which was which. There were others when I let loose so much that the whole thing lost its face. These days I try to correct course by looking at the entire catalogue at once, not cover by cover.

The title is in charge

In my songs the title is usually half the joke. «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet), «No quiero otro novio cojín» (I don't want another cushion boyfriend), «Mi novio de Albacete» (My boyfriend from Albacete). They're titles that already paint a picture in the head of whoever reads them. That's both a gift and a trap.

The gift is that I nearly always have somewhere to start. The trap is going literal, illustrating the title word by word like a hieroglyph. If the title already says ice-cream cone, maybe the cover doesn't need to repeat the cone. It can go for the tone, the feeling, something sideways. I like it when the image and the title finish each other's sentences instead of saying the same thing twice.

With some songs I pull it off. With others I give up and put the obvious thing, because sometimes the obvious thing works and that's fine.

The album covers

Singles are one thing. The GAYFOLK trilogy is another. «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK», «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK» and «El día de la liberación» play as a single story in three acts, and I wanted the three covers to read as a series too. So that, seeing them side by side, you'd understand there's a before and an after. So that the third one could never go first.

There the problem was the reverse. With singles I want each one to stand apart. With the trilogy I wanted the three to belong to one another. I found it easier, maybe because the story had already drawn the path: arriving at a place where you can be who you are, longing to go there and, at last, liberation day. Three moments, three different temperatures.

Every so often someone suggests that, with this much output, I should have somebody else take care of the covers. I get it. But the cover is the first thing anyone sees of a song, before they hear a single note, and I can't quite bring myself to let go of that first impression. When I decide it, I know that what people see and what they hear next come out of the same head.

There's a bit of vice in it too, I confess. I enjoy it. It's the part of the job where I think with my eyes instead of with words, and after writing a lyric, switching senses is a rest.

Looking at them all together

There's an exercise I recommend to anyone who releases work in series, whether it's music, illustration or photos. Every now and then, lay out everything you've made in a grid and look at it from a distance. Don't read anything. Just colours and shapes. You'll spot patterns you never saw piece by piece: tics, repetitions, eras. I do it and I always get a surprise, not always a pleasant one.

That grid, in my case, is almost a visual diary of these two years. You can see the moments when I was sure of myself and the moments when I was searching. I wouldn't change it, even though I'd change plenty of the individual covers.

The covers, each with its song, are at mikesaintlouis.com.