Christopher Wallace, better know to the world as Notorious B.I.G., was gunned down on March 9, 1997.
While it’s important to mourn the loss of one of the most influential MCs ever, it’s just as important to celebrate the life. The good people over at ego trip scored an interview with Ebon Heath, who lead the design team responsible for the above album cover. You can read the full interview here, and take a look at the two unearthed concept covers down below.
And then it was crazy because once we were doing all the comps we still didn’t know [the graveyard photos] would play such a part in the branding of it. When we were doing all the comps we were still going for the bright shit. And we did rounds and rounds and Puff just wasn’t happy. We had this one that I really thought we’d gotten it, where we were doing a whole clear jewel-case and just silk-screening the packaging on there so everything was clear. And it was just [Big] sort of walking in silhouette through the clouds, like really simple. Even the disc was on silver. Everything was really subtle and beautiful. We did the whole comp like, that’s the winner, that’s the winner!
And yeah, nah. [Puffy] finally wound up choosing that [eventual] shot [from the graveyard], and we just switched to dark. Once he chose that for the cover we just went dark. We went with blind embosses, and we started burning all this type and we did all this shit with ash. Just really trying to push that sense of the fire and the ash. And then even that was pulled back to what it finally became. But this was all still before [Big] passed. All this shit was done before he passed.
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