Secret 7" 2016 Charity record sleeve design

Established in 2012, Secret 7" is an annual event combining music and art for charitable causes. Each year 7 well-known tracks are selected and 100 of each are pressed to 7" vinyl. It is then an open invite to the world to create their own graphical representation of a track for the sleeve. 700 creatives are subsequently picked and their creative solutions are exhibited and sold as one-off pieces of artwork for charity. Now for the secret, the purchaser is unaware of who designed the sleeve or even the track it contains, until they have parted with their hard-earned cash.

This year the selected charity was Amnesty International and the exhibition was hosted at Sonos Studios, Shoreditch, London. The event attracts very high-profile contributors such as Sir Anish Kapoor, Sir Paul Smith, Why Not Associates, and Anthony Burrill.

For 2016, the track options were eclectic as usual:
Imagine – John Lennon / At Last – Etta James / Dream 3 – Max Richter / Art School – The Jam / The Less I Know The Better – Tame Impala / Clearest Blue – Chvrches/ Worry – Jack Garratt.

I had been developing experimental, typographic designs for a personal project – Marbles – and the name of the Max Richter track – Dream 3 – immediately drew me to the number three within the set. This was the perfect opportunity to put the new bespoke typography to work.

Secret 7" is a great event and it would be an honour to be selected. So it was important to push the typographic design in a new, distinct direction that would lead to a unique record sleeve design. Dreams are often complex with numerous tangled layers. So by splitting the paths within the typographic design it was possible via the use of shadow to convey a layered sense of depth.

To suggest the sense of drifting in and out of sleep, the ends of the paths were extended past the boundary of the letterform to meander and fade into the darkness. Lastly, recolouring and application of a stone texture led to a feeling of moonlight and a suitably ambiguous, dream-like form.

The hard work paid off with the artwork making the final cut. Design submissions were also selected for Secret 7" in 2015 and 2020. In addition to this the Marbles project used for the final creative solution subsequently won a Creativepool design award for typography.