Un Verano Sin Ti

The cover for Un Verano Sin Ti began with a sketch Bad Bunny drew during the pandemic lockdown — a simple sad heart that would become one of the most recognizable images in recent music. In summer 2021, he reached out to Los Angeles-based graphic designer Adrian Hernandez, professionally known as Ugly Primo and founder of the creative agency Need Pastel, with his vision for the artwork. The two had been working together since 2018, when Hernandez first connected with the artist after drawing him online.

"He reached out to me with the idea of the cover and how he wanted it to look," Hernandez told Billboard. "He pretty much had it laid out for me and I helped execute that idea and turn it into an art piece." Working from Bad Bunny's original sketch, Hernandez developed approximately seven versions across different styles and aesthetics. The process took over six months before they settled on one of the first concepts they had developed together.

The final artwork features a melancholy one-eyed heart character set against a tropical beach scene — light blue ocean, a beaming sunset, palm trees, dolphins, and pink flowers. The cover's central tension is its defining visual argument: a grieving figure placed inside a paradise. The heart doesn't clash with the setting; it belongs there, which gives the image its emotional specificity. The world around it is fully saturated in warm tones while the heart reads as comparatively muted — sadness and joy in the same frame simultaneously.

Hernandez's style — flat color planes, bold outlines, cartoon figuration — sits within a lineage of Chicano graphic art and Latin American poster design, filtered through the aesthetic of contemporary streetwear and lowbrow art. The deliberate retention of the sketch's rawness across seven iterations signals that polish was never the goal.

The cover was unveiled on May 4, 2022, two days before the album's release through Rimas Entertainment, marking Bad Bunny's first album promoted with advance announcement rather than a surprise drop. Fan response was immediate. In Puerto Rico, tattoo artist Juan Salgado offered free heart tattoos to over 150 fans at his San Juan shop the day after release, with a Miami shop doing the same. Bad Bunny extended the image into physical promotion by decorating lifeguard huts at Puerto Rican beaches with the artwork and QR codes for streaming. "It's surreal to be able to have a piece of art have that type of impact on people's lives," Hernandez reflected. "I think it's beautiful."