Johnny Rawls's Going Back to Mississippi
Johnny Rawls is a legendary blues artist whose soulful voice and timeless storytelling captivate audiences worldwide. With a career spanning decades, he continues to honor the roots of blues while sharing his passion for music with new generations.
DELIVERABLES
- CD Packaging
OBJECTIVES
The CD was centered on its title. The studio provided professional photos of Rawls, with a specific request to incorporate new backgrounds while featuring an image of him pointing. They also supplied previous CD designs as references, ensuring continuity with Johnny’s preferred aesthetic.
For Johnny Rawls’ album, I focused on a modern, clean look that aligned with his previous designs—emphasizing typography alongside his image while keeping the color palette minimal. Given the album’s theme of returning to Mississippi, I chose the Mississippi River as the new background, reinforcing the connection to his roots. The river image was converted to a dark green monochrome, with two shades of gray layered in to create subtle depth and define the ground and wall elements. The grays helped reduce texture and visual noise, ensuring the album title remained the focal point.
The color scheme was pulled directly from Johnny Rawls’ shirt—dark green, gold, and red—to create cohesion and a natural flow throughout the design. The album title became a key typographic element, combining two fonts into a single unified image used consistently across the album. The same font from the title was applied to the track list and contributor credits, maintaining visual harmony.
A defining line was placed beneath the album title, giving it structure and balance. Additional lines were strategically used to organize the contributor credits on the back cover, placed around a Photoshopped image of Johnny’s guitar, which featured the same Mississippi River background as the front cover. This approach ensured that both imagery and typography worked together to create a cohesive, professional, and timeless design.
After thoughts include improving the grey background by adding subtle texture, softening edges and tweaking shadows to make it appear more realistic, as well as adjusting Mr. Rawls’ shadows for a more grounded feel.