The album's cover was designed by Milestone Media Founder/Creative Director and chief artist Denys Cowan, according to the album's liner notes. Cowan's black and white line art was inked by Inker Prentis Rollins. Milestone's Color Editor, Jason Scott Jones created the cover color art digitally at a time when digital coloring was emerging in comic art eventually becoming the standard. GZA's personal manager Geoffrey L. Garfield, commissioned Cowan. Garfield, an avid comic book fan, said the cover art was supervised under the auspices of GZA GrafX, a subsidiary company of GZA Entertainment owned by GZA and Garfield. The concept of the chessboard with its sword-wielding warriors was conceived by GZA, an avid chess player. The GZA version of the Wu-Tang Clan logo, the "G" using the logo iconography, was rendered by Wu-Tang Clan DJ Mathematics who was also an accomplished graphic artist.