Description

The cover of Brat is a lime green square with one lowercase word on it. Designer Brent David Freaney of the New York studio Special Offer, Inc. looked at around 500 shades before choosing the colour. "I wanted to go with an offensive, off-trend shade of green to trigger the idea of something being wrong," he said. The word is set in plain Arial, chosen because it felt the opposite of precious, and the lettering is slightly stretched and soft at the edges, as if it had been made in a hurry.

Many people hated it. Some fans complained that it looked cheap or unfinished, and Charli xcx herself pushed back, asking why listeners feel such "ownership over female artists" and their choices. The plainness was the joke and the strategy: anyone with a laptop could copy it, and millions did.

After the album came out on 7 June 2024, the green square turned into a meme generator and then a season. "Brat summer" spread across social media, fashion and advertising, and when Charli tweeted about Kamala Harris that July, the presidential campaign adopted the colour and the font for its own posts. Charli later said she "was not being political". Few covers have ever escaped their record so completely, and Brat did it with a single word.

Credit

Artwork and packaging by Special Offer, Inc. (Brent David Freaney)