Designer loses A$AP Rocky gig after posting screenshot of the rapper’s message
TheGrio...
A$AP Rocky says he won’t work with designer Allan Peters after Peters shared their private Instagram DM publicly, calling the post “distasteful.”
A potential collaboration between A$AP Rocky and logo designer Allan Peters ended before it started, and it all came down to a screenshot.
According to a post shared by Angela Yee and others that includes the now deleted Instagram post, Rocky had reached out to Peters through Instagram to ask about hiring him for revisions on brand logo work. Peters then posted the private message publicly. Rocky responded directly in the comments, calling the move “distasteful” and pulling the plug on the spot. “Well I guess we won’t be working, best of luck buddy,” he wrote. Peters has since deleted the post.
The exchange has since become a talking point online, largely because it touches a nerve familiar to anyone building a career in creative fields: the line between celebrating a win and violating a confidence.
That tension played out in the reactions. On Threads, writer Alex Washington defended Rocky’s decision outright, arguing that discretion is part of the job. “Everything isn’t content,” she wrote. “If you leaked this what else are you going to leak before the deal is done?” Others landed somewhere softer, reading the moment as an unfortunate misstep rather than a betrayal. “I feel so bad for Allan,” another user posted. “He was genuinely just excited.”
Both reads are understandable. For a designer, an unsolicited message from an artist of Rocky’s stature represents genuine validation, the kind of moment that’s tempting to share. But for a client, especially one operating at that level, an inquiry about unreleased brand work is business, and business tends to stay behind closed doors until it’s signed.
What makes the moment resonate is how ordinary the underlying dilemma is. Creatives are increasingly expected to build visibility online, which means the instinct to post is baked into how many now operate. This exchange served as a public reminder that the same instinct can cost real work.
Neither Rocky nor Peters has offered further comment beyond the now-deleted post and the rapper’s brief reply, leaving the internet to litigate the etiquette question on its own.