Album artwork, brand identity, and creative direction with a brutalist edge and a luxury finish. I build worlds around culture.
HARLEM HALLOWEEN 2: how a free mixtape got a face. A Ben Cooper inspired mask, one back seat shoot, and a release built to own its audience instead of renting one, told as it happened.
Every October of my childhood started the same way: a Ben Cooper costume in a box, thin plastic mask held on by a string, the smell of the vinyl. Those masks were cheap, bright, and a little off, and that was the magic. When Harlem told me he was making a Halloween tape, I knew what the face had to be. Not a logo. A mask, the way Ben Cooper would have made him in 1985. I am his father and his manager, and this company, Harlem & Denim, is a family operation. One world, no rented pieces: the mask, the covers, the site, the list, all built in house.
The campaign started in the back seat of a car. No studio. No set build. A fur coat, a styrofoam cup, and a film look. We shot Harlem the way the music sounds: loose, close, and a little haunted. That one session fed everything that followed. The cover photography. The story cards. The hero of his website. When a campaign feels like one piece, this is usually why. It literally is one day, one car, one set of frames.
The mask came next, and it is the heart of the project. I designed Harlem as a Ben Cooper mask: his locs, his grin, rendered in that glossy vacuum formed plastic the originals were made from. The design lived on the covers and the site first. Then we made it real. A physical mask, fabricated by hand from my design, with my notes on the paint until it matched the drawing. Darker here. The teeth have to read. On November 1, the night after the tape drops, Harlem walks into Churchill's Pub in Miami wearing it. A drawing becomes a thing a crowd can see from the back of the room. That was always the point.
Front cover: the mask alone on charcoal, fanged, floating like it is hanging in a store window in 1985. Nothing else gets to talk. Back cover: the back seat frame with the mask beside it, the tracklist set big and staggered like a poster, liner notes written the way the tape deserves, and the campaign palette in a strip along the bottom. A record should document its own colors.
The tape is free, and it lives in exactly one place: imharlem.com/halloween. The page carries the mask, a countdown to midnight on Halloween, and one ask: join the list for first access when it drops. No store. No streaming rollout. A landing page with one job converts better than a page with five. And every signup belongs to us, not to a platform.
Exclusivity creates the value. The only way to hear this tape is to be in the room we built, so the presave is a promise: join the list, and at midnight on October 31 the download lands in your inbox before it lives anywhere else. The list heard it first, and the list received a welcome email the moment they signed up, updates through October, and the drop itself by email at midnight, with every download counted. Around it, a seven frame story sequence carries drop week: the shoot, the tracklist, the mask, and the ask held back until the last frames, because the final word goes to family. Streams rent you an audience for a weekend. A list is an audience you keep. This campaign was built to keep it.
This story is still being written. On October 31 the tape drops at midnight, free, only at imharlem.com/halloween. On November 1 Harlem walks into Churchill's Pub in Miami wearing the mask. The drop numbers, the growth of the list, and the mask on stage land in this chapter on November 2. The ending gets written when it happens, with the real figures.
Blood, Sweat & Tears: how two album covers for Harlem's DELUXE went from a rejected concept to a dual release, told in five parts.
Two records shaped this project. The original concept pulled its silver and black palette straight from Jay-Z's In My Lifetime Vol. 3. The alternate cover is Harlem tipping his hat to Playboi Carti and Whole Lotta Red, down to the red bandana. Two eras of hip hop, one project.
The DELUXE cover started with Harlem's first Miami show of 2025. I pulled the most powerful shots from that night and built the whole layout around them. I was looking at Jay-Z's In My Lifetime Vol. 3, that silver and black palette, and I ran with it. Then I put my Luxury Brutalist grunge finish on the photos and added a single blood splatter to two of the images. That was the blood, sweat, and tears Harlem put into the project.
I showed it to him thinking he would fall in love on the spot. He did not. The deadline was that Friday and UnitedMasters needed the work. Harlem wanted a whole new shoot. I told him we did not have time, but if he could get Tatsuya to shoot a few frames and get them to me fast, I would make it work. He kept putting it off.
Finally my wife Verlene shot a few frames of him holding a red bandana against the outside wall of our home. That was Harlem tipping his hat to Playboi Carti and Whole Lotta Red. The photos were medium resolution at best. I took them into Photoshop and built a masterpiece out of them in full Luxury Brutalist style. I even made the DELUXE wordmark out of roses from a tee I had designed for Harlem and Denim.
I had already turned in the first concept to hit the deadline. Then I submitted the new one, the one Harlem approved, as the alternate cover. It got approved for the April 25th, 2026 release. Both covers went live on every platform. Fans got to pick the cover that matched their mood, based on the color and the texture.
Single and album artwork built around your sound. Cover, back cover, and streaming assets.
Logo, palette, type, and the full system. An identity that holds up everywhere it shows up.
Vision and art direction across a release, campaign, or brand. Concept through execution.
Content built for the feed and a strategy behind it. Posts that look like you on your best day.
I'm Don Pitts II, a designer and creative director based in Miami. I study Visual Arts at Full Sail University with a minor in Graphic Design. My practice is luxury brutalism — raw energy cut with a refined finish. I build worlds around culture: I art direct and design for the artist Harlem, building his covers, campaigns, and world from the ground up.
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