Iron Legion — Heavy Metal Album Cover Design

CD/album design, illustration, typography

Project

Information

The Client

This project started as an original t-shirt concept built around the imagery of WWII turret gunners. The subject was always meant to translate into music merch territory, so as the art developed it expanded into a full album cover concept for a fictitious heavy metal band. The target audience is heavy metal fans, music merch collectors, and bands or labels looking for bold, illustration-driven cover and apparel artwork.

The Goal

The influences were 1980s heavy metal album art and the animated film Heavy Metal. I wanted the piece to have that over-the-top energy those sources had, where the illustration, the type, and the overall composition all feel like they belong to the same world. The goal was to build something that worked as a standalone piece of art and also as a practical design that could live on a vinyl cover, a CD sleeve, a t-shirt, or a poster without losing anything in translation.

The Result

The finished design is built around a central turret gunner illustration framed in a porthole, with crossed rockets, wing elements, and custom arc lettering wrapping the composition. The type was designed to carry the same weight as the illustration rather than just sitting on top of it. As the mockups show, the design holds up on both a vinyl record sleeve and a fitted t-shirt without reworking the layout. It is a spec piece, but it is production-ready and demonstrates the kind of music merch and album cover work I do for bands and labels.