Designing Album Covers for My Playlists
I built a Claude Code skill that generates an album cover for each of my Spotify playlists. It started when I was organizing my liked songs into mood/genre based playlists. A colleague of mine does something similar with his own music: dedicated albums for specific genres, each with a unifying visual theme. I wanted that for mine too.
The template
Every cover follows the same fixed template: dense topographic contour lines on a near-black background, terrain shape and color both driven by the playlist’s mood. I wanted something simple and abstract, and topography felt right. Sharp, jagged ridgelines read as high-energy. Slow, undulating ones read as hypnotic. The color gradient (warm reds for aggressive, cool blues for melancholic, and so on) layers a second signal on top.
SAT word title
Each cover’s title is a SAT vocabulary word chosen to match the playlist’s character. Partly because I like SAT words, partly because it’s a fun way to pick up vocabulary along the way. Plus, some of them make solid names.
Figuring out the genre
Sometimes I already know the genre for a batch of songs. Other times I’ve got just one song I want to build a playlist around, and I’m not sure yet what else belongs with it. In that case, the skill asks six questions adapted from real music-information-retrieval (MIR) classification:
- ⚡ Arousal: is the energy high and driving, or low and calm
- 🎭 Valence: bright and positive, or dark and melancholic
- 🎸 Instrumentation: electronic or acoustic, vocal or instrumental
- 🌡️ Timbre: warm and rounded, or cold and sharp
- 📈 Structure: builds to a peak, or holds one atmosphere throughout
- 🎯 Reference: one artist or song this reminds me of
The answers place the song on a mood grid and suggest a genre from there.
My “Propulsive” playlist started that way: a handful of upbeat songs I wanted grouped together, no genre in mind yet. The MIR questions landed on tech house, the skill picked “Propulsive” as the word, and the cover came back in sharp red ridgelines, matching the energy.
See the playlists
The playlists these covers belong to are all on my tracker, with art and track counts pulled live from Spotify. More covers show up there as I sort more songs.