Album Artwork · Bear McCreary

The Singularity: Ekleipsis

Cover, logo, and the full vinyl and CD package for the second chapter of Bear McCreary’s symphonic metal saga.

Bear McCreary scores some of the biggest films and series on screen. The Singularity is the record he makes for himself, a symphonic metal saga with its own story and its own world, built with a rotating cast that has included Slash, Serj Tankian, Steve Vai, and Stewart Copeland.

I designed the cover for the first chapter in 2024. For the second, Ekleipsis, I got to design all of it. The cover, the wordmark, and the full vinyl and CD package.

The cover of Bear McCreary’s first Singularity album, designed by State of the Design — The cover of *The Singularity*, and Bear McCreary signing copies of the album and the graphic novel.

Bear McCreary signing copies of The Singularity album and graphic novel — The cover of *The Singularity*, and Bear McCreary signing copies of the album and the graphic novel.

The Brief

There was already an album in the world called The Singularity. This was part two, and it had to read as an evolution of the first, not a fresh start. The first cover was a single object, a glowing orb, the singularity itself.

Keep the orb. Show what comes next.

Ekleipsis album cover exploration, exploding circle — Early explorations. Recoloring and rotating the original orb, before the idea grew past a simple twist.

Ekleipsis album cover exploration, central eye — Early explorations. Recoloring and rotating the original orb, before the idea grew past a simple twist.

The Solution

The move was to stop treating the orb as an object and set it inside a scene. That scene became the album itself. A world tipping into disarray, an overbearing force closing in from the horizon, everything beneath it thrown into chaos. The orb from the first album became the thing rising in the distance.

It fit the name. Ekleipsis is the Greek root of the word eclipse, a forsaking, a failing, the moment before something disappears. So the cover reads like one. And down on the road stands a young girl who refuses to flinch.

Ekleipsis. Greek for a failing, a forsaking. The root of the word eclipse.

The Singularity: Ekleipsis album cover designed for Bear McCreary — The final cover.

The Wordmark

For Ekleipsis itself, I set the album name in an inky, hand-written script with real character, and pushed the ink so it felt written in a hurry. Because the word means eclipse, the mark needed one.

I built a brush out of the script’s own strokes and drew a single arc.

The Result

For the package, Bear pulled elements straight out of the songs. There is a track called “Black Box,” so a plane went down in the field. Another is called “The Chandelier,” so for the gatefold his team bought one, smashed it, and photographed the wreckage for me.

For the package I layered multiple textures and images together to create abstract moments for the Ekleipsis visual language I was creating.

Every surface was built from layered textures. Metal, glass, smoke, concrete, grass, and fire, each recolored to the cover’s exact cast and stacked until no single one of them is legible on its own.