Project: Secret 7"

At the start of this year, I entered a competition on the website Talenthouse. The competition was working along with Record Store Day, (which happened this Saturday) and the Teenage Cancer Trust. 


The Project itself was too design a seven inch record cover for any of the following bands, Florence + The Machine, The Cure, DJ Shadow, Bombay Bicycle Club, Ben Howard, CSS, and Noah and the Whale, as they were all releasing tracks for the project.


In there own words: "There is something about vinyl that transcends every format that has followed in its path. An integral reason for this is that it's allure and functionality allows the listener to be absorbed by more than one of their senses. Secret 7" is a project which aims to rekindle some of the excitement for sleeve art in the digital era by exploring how a track would be interpreted by an array of brilliant artists."


So you had to design a cover that wouldn't give the game away about who the artist was, you couldn't have any text on it with the artist or track name on it, it just had to be a piece of art. The bands would then all each pick their favourite 45 covers for their track, and the 5 'most voted for' designs on Talenthouse would also get into the exhibit. Other famous professional illustrators and graphic designers were brought in to design work, as well as musicians like Robert Smith from The Cure. The Exhibit was to be at the idea Idea Generation Gallery in London (18th - 22nd April), and the artwork would be sold off for the Charity at the end of the week, so I thought this was a bit of a big deal, and definitely worth entering.


I chose to create the cover for Bombay Bicycle Club's track, which was a remix of one of the songs off their last album. It had a bit of a hazy, lilting, almost reggae feel, so my favourite idea was to create a bit of a loose llusion, that looked like sound waves and had a 'reggae colour palette'.  Here was my design:





To cut a story short, my work was selected! It wasn't one of most voted for on Talenthouse, but in fact the band themselves picked my design, which is really cool. It's great to have an opportunity to get my work exhibited in London, and have my work exhibited alongside respected Illustrators and Designers, here's some images from the Exhibit:

My name is on there...

The Exhibit

Bottom Right

The Opening Night

To buy one of the pieces it would cost £40, and from looking at Twitter over the weekend, it looked like mine got sold on this first morning, which is great. I hope they do this again next year, although it'll probably be even harder to get selected! I get a signed version of my sleeve design sent to me, i'll pop it up on here when it comes in the post.