Un Verano Sin Ti

The first thing you notice is the eye. A single, swollen eye stares out from the middle of a fat red heart, its frown drawn in a wobbly black line, two stick arms ending in white-gloved cartoon hands, two stubby legs in heavy boots planted in the sand. Everything around this creature is pure summer joy, and yet it droops. That tension is the whole point.

Behind the sad heart, the scene practically vibrates. A swollen orange sun beams up over a band of light blue ocean, throwing spiky rays across a sky that melts from red into bubblegum pink. Two little birds float as black checkmarks against the glow. Three purple dolphins arc through the upper left like they were cut from a beach towel. Palm trees lean in from both sides, their green fronds scribbled with deliberate, childlike energy, and pink five-petaled flowers dot the foreground sand. The heart stands on a golden dune, alone in paradise.

That loneliness is the title made visible. Un Verano Sin Ti, a summer without you. Bad Bunny arrived at this image with the idea already pretty much laid out, reaching out to a Los Angeles graphic designer named Adrian Hernandez, who works under the name Ugly Primo, with a drawing and a vision of how he wanted it to look. Then he did something generous: he left it open to interpretation.

What followed was not a quick job. Talks about the cover began as early as the summer of 2021, and Hernandez ended up making roughly seven versions in different styles and aesthetics, all built from the drawing Bad Bunny gave him. The whole thing took a little over six months to finish. In the end, the chosen one was among the first they made, the version Bad Bunny connected with most, the single image that best captured a summer spent missing someone.

The friendship behind it goes back further than the album. Hernandez and Bad Bunny had known each other since 2018, when he first launched the Ugly Primo project making pop art of major Latin artists. So when the biggest star in the world handed him a sketch, it landed in the hands of someone who already understood the work. Hernandez confirmed he helped execute the idea and turn it into a finished art piece, the rough drawing becoming this thick-lined, slightly grainy, sun-soaked cartoon.

The look is deliberately unpolished, and that is its charm. The textures have a printed, screen-tone grain. The hands are oversized and floppy. The boots are too big. The sun's rays are uneven. It reads less like a corporate album rollout and more like a doodle blown up to poster size, a feeling that matched the loose, beachy, reggaeton-and-cumbia-and-indie-pop mood inside.

The cover was revealed on May 4, 2022, two days before the album dropped on May 6 through Rimas Entertainment. Then something happened that even Hernandez found hard to believe: fans connected with the lonely little heart so deeply that some got it tattooed on their bodies. He called the whole thing surreal, the experience of watching his drawing become permanent on strangers' skin.

The music carried the image to staggering heights. Un Verano Sin Ti debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, Bad Bunny's second chart-topper, and held the top spot for thirteen weeks. It finished as the best-performing album of the entire year, crowning the Billboard 200 Year-End Chart. So the saddest face of 2022, a one-eyed heart frowning on a perfect beach, ended up smiling down on everyone else's summer.