KROMA Synapse: Visual Identity

Self-initiated concept: thumbnail sketches, hundreds of rejected generations and one strict palette, carried from key visual to vinyl.

A black face with gold wire lines tracing its features, with long black cables streaming behind it

The Brief

A self-initiated concept: the visual identity for a hip-hop release, built to look premium rather than "street". The test was whether one strong idea could survive everything from a thumbnail in a streaming feed to a vinyl sleeve.

Three decisions

Palette. Black and metallic gold, nothing else. A strict two-colour palette is recognised instantly at thumbnail size, and it borrows the codes of luxury fashion rather than standard music graphics.

Metaphor. The gold is the anatomy, not the decoration: the artist’s flow rewriting the human form. That is why it appears as wire and circuitry running through the figure, not as a surface finish.

Composition. Everything is built around the gaze. In a feed that gives an image about three seconds, the face has to hold eye contact at a very small size.

From sketch to final

Before any model, I drew thumbnails: pushed further than quick scribbles, so the tone was decided by hand. The gold line study tests the gaze and the tangle of lines; the ink study tests how the lines wrap the head.

Thumbnail sketch in gold line on black: a face with an intense gaze surrounded by a tangle of fine lines
Thumbnail 1: line study in gold on black, finding the gaze.
Thumbnail sketch in black ink on a grey textured ground: a head in profile wrapped by flowing looping lines
Thumbnail 2: ink study, finding how the lines wrap the head.

Hundreds of rejects

The images were generated with Stable Diffusion 1.5 and upscaler nodes in ComfyUI, at the start of the generative-image era. I generated and rejected hundreds of them. The ones that survived are the ones that held to the three decisions above, so the result comes from selection against a brief, not from one prompt.

WORKFLOW // KROMA SYNAPSE

COMFYUI / STABLE DIFFUSION

The node graph behind the images: prompting with positive and negative prompts, then upscale nodes.

Generated figure with a gold mask face and gold wire wrapped around a black armoured torso, on a black ground
A pass that survived selection.
Generated figure of a dancer made of fine gold wire and beads, in motion against black
Another: gold as anatomy.

What I decided, what the tool did

The model produced image candidates. Everything that makes it a project came from me:

  • The concept and the gold-anatomy metaphor.
  • The palette rules and the composition criteria.
  • The thumbnail sketches that set the tone.
  • The selection: choosing a handful from hundreds of candidates.
  • Clean-up, compositing and type in After Effects and Photoshop.
  • The packaging, the vinyl layout and the animated loops.

One idea, every format

The same key visual carries across packaging, a vinyl sleeve and short animated loops, so the identity holds in every format it would meet.

CD packaging mockup carrying the black and gold key visual
CD packaging.
Vinyl record sleeve mockup carrying the black and gold key visual
Vinyl sleeve.

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