Journal
Twelve sleeves, one grid: the Mono Records system
How we gave a Porto record label an identity without taking the sleeves away from its artists.
Article· 4 min read
By Hugo Matos
Mono Records has twelve artists, and before last year it had twelve ways of designing a sleeve. Every record was beautiful. None of them looked like Mono.
Split the sleeve in two
The system is one rule. The artist owns the top half of every sleeve and can put anything there: a photograph, a painting, nothing at all. The label owns the bottom half, where the name is set in lower case, as large as the format allows, and cropped differently every time.
- One grid for LPs, singles, cassettes and streaming covers.
- Two colours, black and yellow, that print cheaply on any stock.
- A release number on every sleeve, so the shelf reads in order.
The artists stopped asking for exceptions once they saw the shelf. Twelve records side by side make a better poster than any one of them.
Twelve releases in, the system has not needed a single change. The next one, Lumen's Tidal Hours, is out on vinyl on 14 November.