Hiroshi Nagai

Hiroshi Nagai (Japanese: 永井博, born December 22, 1947) is a Japanese graphic designer and illustrator, known for his cover designs of city pop albums in the 1980s, which established the recognizable visual aesthetic associated with the loosely defined music genre.

[5][6] He was inspired to become an artist by his father who enjoyed oil-painted landscapes began working as a graphic designer in 1970.

[7] After visiting the United States and Guam between 1973 and 1975, he was impressed by its scenery, which became the starting point of his subsequent style.

[8] Starting in the 1980s, he created tropical and clear landscape illustrations as typified by the record jackets of Eiichi Otaki's A Long Vacation and Niagara Song Book [jp].

Nagai's work had an influence on the vaporwave style[4] and gained wider recognition in the early 2020s,[9] partially thanks to the YouTube era.