Secret 7: Production

I printed a physical sleeve for the submission, as I wanted to see how well the design works in a real life context. Printing onto matte white A3 paper worked well and creating the sleeve was simple from a net. The only thing I would change about the final physical product is the fold in the net - instead of having the clean fold at the bottom of the sleeve I would make it at the opposite edge to the opening, to make the sleeve look a bit cleaner.

The brief for Secret 7 requires a digital submission of our chosen design. However, since the song title and concept of my cover plays on the aspect of touch and texture, I wanted to include a physical copy of my design using a process. I chose to stay away from embossing a cover as this resembles Braille too closely and if the word from the title is felt or read by a blind person, the title may be given away, rendering the secrecy aspect of the brief useless. Instead of embossing, spot varnishing the dots on the cover will mean the dots have some sort of texture to them. While this slightly contradicts the concept of my design 'No Surface All Feeling' by adding a surface to the design - the physical copy will not be submitted to Secret 7, just the digital design. The spot varnish will add depth to the overall design, but still be unreadable for its intended purpose.

Mock up of the spot varnish

Using a textile screen and negative of my secret 7 cover I spot varnished my design onto a 7" record sleeve. Following the same process as screenprinting, I exposed my screen so the dots would be ready for varnishing. 

As the screen was coated quite thickly, I exposed the screen once at 90 on the UV unit, but the design still was not fully washed off so I exposed it again for 3 minutes on the LED unit. This meant I lost a bit of time in the process. Unfortunately, due to how thick the emulsion was on the screen the emulsion didn't fully wash off once exposed which mean the varnish did not adhere to all areas of the design.