For the Secret 7" 2015 exhibition at Somerset House, we were commissioned by Monotype to create a limited-edition typographic print based on one of the tracks from the show. Unlike the main event, the brief was to use the track name, but only the track name — no artist, no lyrics, just the track.

Having been given the shortest song title in the line-up – Go by The Maccabees – and tasked with only using Monotype fonts (limited by the fact that the largest metal fonts Monotype made for letterpress were 72pt) we were going to need a clever solution to make an impact on an A2 poster.

So we turned to the vinyl of the track itself: its circular form creating the perfect ‘o’ – and one half of our title – at a near perfect size for A2… if it could be printed. We set about carefully mounting the record to make it ‘type high’ (exactly .918 of an inch) so that it would work on our presses. Printing directly from a record was slow and tricky, and it required incredibly precise inking: too much and the fine grooves would fill in, too little and it appeared faint and patchy. In the end the record needed to be cleaned between each of the 100 prints and re-inked from scratch. A golden circle was then overprinted to form the ‘counter’ of the o and the label of the record. This was paired with a ‘G’ from the geometric font FF Super Grotesk, released digitally in 1999, specially laser-cut at 504pt (or 7”). Printed in black, gold and orange.