How I created personalized Spotify playlist covers to spruce up my library

I’ve been a Spotify user for over a decade and, while many of my favorite playlists are ones that I’ve followed or added from other users, I still have my own fair share of personal playlists. Spotify usually does a good job of assigning a temporary default playlist art with the first four album covers from the songs you add, but I don’t think that’s a clean look.

I’ve spent weeks organizing my Spotify library with different folders and sub-folders and a carefully curated system to sort and find the playlist I need, so having lazy generic covers was the last thing I wanted. Over the years, I’ve tried to find online graphics and icons to apply to my playlists, but I recently realized I could make much more personalized cover art with Gemini’s Nano Banana. Here’s how I’ve used it to spruce up my Spotify library.

Making variants of Discover Weekly and Release Radar

For years now, I’ve had an IFTTT recipe that automatically copies any new song in my Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists into an archive playlist. That way, if I ever miss an update to my Discover or Release playlists for a week or don’t have the time to check them, or maybe if I’m not in the mood to listen to music during that week, I can always go back and listen to what Spotify had in store for me. Plus, every year, I spend a bit of time going through the full archive to rediscover and enjoy the music I stumbled upon (or remove the songs I don’t like).

My “Discover Archive” and “Release Radar” playlists have had generic cover art all this time because I was too lazy to create something in Photoshop. But Gemini saved me a lot of time. I just dropped in the default Discover Weekly playlist cover and told it to upscale it, replace “Weekly” with “Archive” and switch the color scheme to yellow and orange instead of pink and purple. The result is perfect with the right font and effect.

I did the same thing with the Release Radar playlist, replacing “Radar” with “Archive” and switching to a blue and green color scheme. Again, I got a perfect playlist cover that is distinct enough from the original to not confuse it, but is still close to the original design to help me know what I’m looking at at a glance. You can see the results in the two images above.

I have a series of genre-based playlists that cover the gamut from Chill to Country, House Party, Latin, Rock, and so on. A long time ago, I found a distinct free set of icons that I used for them. I didn’t think I’d need that icon pack again, but I recently made an Arabic playlist, separate from my existing Oriental playlist, and I needed something more specific for it. I gave Gemini a few of the existing icons and asked it to generate one in the same style for an Arabic playlist, while keeping the transparent background.

It fulfilled most of the promise, going for an oud as the instrument, using the vertical separation down the middle, and adding the strong diagonal shadow. It’s not a perfect match, as the colors aren’t as vibrant, but I think it works for the purpose of a more Arabic, desert sand-like feel. However, instead of the transparency I asked for, the PNG file it generated had the checkered background built in. I had to use Photoshop to clean it up properly. Still, it’s better than I would’ve done myself, and much faster.

Every year, I follow the Eurovision National Final season and create a playlist with all my favorite songs from different countries that never got selected to go to the final show. I never made any cover art for these playlists, leaving it up to Spotify to assign the generic four-album-art cover to them.

Then I realized that my ideal cover would be based on each year’s official album and design language, but with an extra indication to say these are my favorite songs from the entire season. So I asked Gemini to make these for me, giving it the original image and asking it to make it square and replace specific words with “Season Favorites.” It followed my instructions to perfection, even adopting the same font and color as each original image.

Where Gemini failed me with playlist covers

The above examples are only some of the tricks I’ve used to spruce up my Spotify library’s playlist covers. I’ve also made covers similar to a template for which I’d lost the PSD file, and to create covers from scratch for playlists for which I couldn’t find a pre-made graph that works.

But as I set out to modernize my playlists for all the concert setlists I’ve recently been to, I noticed that no matter how I phrased my requests, Gemini would freak out if I asked it to generate something with a known artist or band name. I can sometimes get it to generate one setlist cover using a band or artist’s logo, but most of the time, it refuses even that, no matter how much I argue with it that I just want the logo and I’m not asking it to generate public figures.

Forget about using the actual band or artist photo. That never worked for me, even if I specified that I didn’t want anything changed in the image, just put it in the middle of the cover, but nope. It took a lot of arguments to get it to make these two covers, so I just gave up on updating the rest of my 30+ concert setlist playlists. I couldn’t even get it to stick to any consistent upper-case or lower-case type or properly change the cover color, so I think my time is best spent finding a PSD template and using Photoshop to create my own covers.

So, if you decide to use Gemini to make your Spotify cover art, just be wary of this limitation if you think you can create a bunch of playlist covers of your favorite band or artist. You can’t.