If You're Reading This It's Too Late

The cover of If You're Reading This It's Too Late is just seven unpunctuated words in black on a white background, written in jerky, angular capitals that slope downward. Many people first assumed Drake had scrawled it himself. It was the work of Jim Joe, an anonymous graffiti writer who began tagging in Montreal and became known in New York for plain, one-colour text.

Jim Joe already had ties to Kanye West's creative circle, and his art had appeared on the Yeezus iTunes page. For Drake, he was given the whole cover. The project dropped by surprise late on 12 February 2015, and fans immediately pored over the words, with some reading them as a message aimed at Birdman and Cash Money.

As Hazlitt put it, "the cover alone was an overnight hit." Fans built free fonts and online generators to make their own versions, the design spread across Etsy merchandise, and Pusha T name-checked Jim Joe on a 2015 track. The album debuted at number one with 535,000 units in its first week.