Secret 7 - The brief + Research

THE RULES.

1. Your design must not include the artist’s name or the song title
2. Concentrate your design on what will be the front, only this will be visible in the exhibition
3. Dimensions should be 184mm x 184mm, with a 3mm bleed all the way around.  That’s 190mm x 190mm in total. The bleed won’t be visible, so bear that in mind.
4. Your file must be produced in CMYK so it’s set-up to be printed. Any PMS specials will be converted. Metallic or fluorescent inks cannot be reproduced
5. Your file must be 300dpi
6. Your file must be saved as either a Tiff, JPEG or PDF
7. Do try and reduce the size of your file as much as possible - 10MB maximum
8. You can submit a sleeve design for as many of our tracks as you like, and more than one for each track
9. You must have until 23:59 GMT on 4th March 2015 to upload your designs. Late submission will not be accepted. We advise that you don’t wait till the last few minute to upload, as the site will be busy
10. Last but certainly not least - if we email you with the good news that you’ve made it into the show please keep it a secret. It makes for a much better project! We ask for all your details when you submit a design so that we can shout about all our designers once our sale day has passed and the secrets are out.

Secret 7

-

"We take 7 tracks from 7 of the best-known musicians around and press each one 100 times to 7” vinyl. We then invite creatives from around the world to interpret the tracks in their own style for every 7”. 700 sleeves are exhibited and then sold for £50 apiece. You don't know who created the sleeve, or even which song it's for, until you have parted with your cash - the secret lies within."

Secret 7 is a great project and charity that raises money on record store day. This year they are donating to Nordoff Robins, which is a musical therapy charity. I feel like this project is an opportunity to do whatever you want to a blank canvas and create something visually interesting / pleasing. The design doesn't have to relate to the song within a concept at all. I want to do something hand rendered for my entry. 

Samuel Burgess Johnston

I discovered Samuel Burgess Johnston through Cargo Collective. His work features a lot of landscapes, patterns and splices of textures, similar to some of Leif Podhajsky's work. It's not something I am going to take influence from in this brief, but it's something I would like to try out. His work is not obvious in how some of the designs are done. I feel like design similair to these would be something that would get accepted into secret 7, just based off of how attractive they are visually. A lot of the clients he has done work for are known musicians, ranging from The 1975, Fekky, Taku and Travi$ scott.

http://samuelburgessjohnson.com/

My Approach

My approach was to step away from the computer and do something hand rendered, then expand upon it. I wanted to do faces. Improve upon my own stylistic illustrations and include influence from other known artists. As I have gotten a physical secret 7 pack, I plan to screen print my final design onto it and then send it in. Physical work is if done well is more likely to get accepted in my opinion, mainly because there will be less people doing physical submissions and they are able to bring a quality to the design that you can't with digital if a different processed is used for printing the artwork.