An identity for the band, the record, and the releases that follow.

Before the Winter is a contemporary Christian rock band based out of Kansas. The engagement started where band-identity work should start. Not with an album cover, but with a mark the band could carry from release to release, into merch, social avatars, stage backdrops, and future work that hadn't been written yet. Once the mark existed, the covers, credits, and video work followed from it.

The scope grew across the year to include the Skyline EP artwork, the Expose Me single, the back-cover tracklist layout, and video production for the EP's release. A single-project relationship became a recurring one because the foundation, the logo, was built to hold more than one release.

The band needed a logo that could communicate the meaning their music is reaching for without resorting to the iconography that Christian rock usually defaults to. The brief: something that reads as rooted, patient, and built for the long form, without genre cliché.

Each cover started as a landscape composition. A complete image capable of holding the emotional weight of the record on its own. The tree-of-life mark was added as the final layer, once the landscape read correctly. Below are the raw covers alongside the finished versions. The design decision is visible in the contrast.

Skyline is the band's EP. Four tracks, recorded with Dustin Ridder at Bullet Ride Productions. The artwork was built around a landscape the band would actually recognize: Kansas terrain at dusk, when the sky still holds the teal of day along the top while the sunset pulls the horizon into warm rose. It's a real skyline, not a stock one.

The cover reads as one unified composition. The tree-of-life mark centered above the horizon, the word "Skyline" set below in a soft blurred sans that echoes the gradient of the sky itself. Nothing competes for attention; the landscape does most of the work.

The Skyline system was built across the full set of surfaces a physical release actually ships on: front cover for digital and streaming, back cover with tracks and credits, CD face for the physical edition, and a tracklist-plus-rationale info sheet that the band could use for press and promotional context.

Expose Me is the EP's opener and also the release that got its own dedicated single artwork. A second cover living in a different aesthetic universe from the EP it appears on. Where Skyline is earth and horizon, Expose Me is atmosphere and deep space: a figure in water under a pink-into-cyan cosmic sky with a ringed body of light overhead.

Holding both covers inside one band identity is part of the work. The tree-of-life mark is the constant; the landscapes underneath it are allowed to shift register. The system was built to flex this way on purpose.

The color system across the two releases was not built to match. It was built to read as the same family while holding two distinct emotional registers. Skyline grounded in terrain, Expose Me suspended in atmosphere. Below are the five values carried through the work.