Secret 7"
Secret 7" is a brilliant charitable event that takes 1 track from 7 different musicians and presses each as a very special edition of just 100 7" vinyls, 700 pressings in total, each with a unique sleeve design. The sleeves themselves are submitted by a wide range of contributors, from renowned musicians, artists and designers, to members of the public. The sleeves are then exhibited and sold to raise money for a very good cause.
The secret is that the buyers’ don’t know for certain which song they were getting or who designed the sleeve until they’ve bought the record: the song title, band name or artist can’t appear on the sleeve design, so it was guesswork whether you were getting the song you wanted.
Across four years, we created five letterpress printed record sleeves for Secret 7" for the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Peter Gabriel, The Maccabees, Max Richter and Vampire Weekend.
COLOPHON
One off
Record sleeve
7" x 7"
Jimi Hendrix
Castles Made of Sand
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Jimi was without doubt one of the greatest and most innovative guitarists ever – a famed left-hander who famously used a standard right-handed guitar but flipped upside down and restrung.
For the sleeve design for Castles Made of Sand, we followed suit and flipped it upside down to make it just right for lefties. The woodtype headline – ‘volume, tone, tone’ – is a nod to the three control pots on Jimi’s iconic Fender Stratocaster, only now in reverse order. Hand inked is a range of suitably psychedelic fluoro colours and printed as a one-off.
Vampire Weekend
Harmony Hall
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For our sleeve for Vampire Weekend’s beautiful Harmony Hall, we took inspiration from the band’s unusual name. Using a single V, we printed it with a little ‘bite’ twice to form a W and create the band’s initials in one single, subtle monogram. A little expressive hand inking over a (mostly) blind deboss, meant the Vs not only became a W, but a pair of bloody fangs as well…
Peter Gabriel
Sledgehammer
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Sledgehammer is a song full of vivid innuendo, so it seemed only fitting to create a sleeve that was equally as suggestive.
The Maccabees
Go
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Sometimes an idea is so simple it doesn’t really need explaining: removing the vinyl from the sleeve simply fills in the blank.
As part of the 2015 exhibition, in collaboration with Monotype, we also created a poster based on this design. Both featured a laser cut G from the font FF Super Grotesk at 504pt (or 7 inches exactly) and used the vinyl itself to complete the song name.
Max Richter
Dream 3
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Having only type at our disposal, we took on the challenge to cover the wordless Dream 3 by the electro-acoustic composer Max Richter; the first Secret 7” track to contain no words. Without lyrics to typeset, we looked to the restfulness of the music: peaceful piano playing repeats through the track, punctuated by rests and gently soaring strings had the perfect accompaniment in typographic punctuation.
Hand typeset purely in punctuation from 48pt Monotype Scotch Roman: Rules become rhythm, colons become chords, dashes become notes held for a duration. Pauses in music become pauses in speech… A minimal design for a minimal piece of music.
