MIRRY
THE CHALLENGE
"Give back a lost voice from the past."
THE ORGANISING IDEA
"Use the writing and imagery of our subject to bring her character to life."
DELIVERABLES
Identity, brand mark, sleeve design.
Album Cover Design
30 years ago, Edinburgh based musician Tom Fraser was helping with the house clearance after his grandfather’s death and found an old scratched Transco record left out on the street. He took it home where it sat on a shelf for years until one day during lockdown, he gave it a play - and a whole world opened up to him. His Great Aunt Mirry had recorded a number of piano compositions, which she had kept secret from her family. Like untold numbers of women whose creative lives did not find an outlet, Mirry never received any accolades for her work but enjoyed the act of creating work for herself. She died in the 1980s but the story of Mirry’s music and secret life is still unfolding.
Tom has been re-working and re-mixing her compositions with his brother-in law Simon Tong (The Verve, The Good the Bad and the Queen, and The Magnetic North) and they hope that this secret life will now reach beyond Mirry’s own four walls. The resulting album is a celebration of Mirry’s work and a call and response to her original recordings with her family members – almost as if she were still in a room with them.
We developed the identity for the project. Designer Eleonora Dalla Rosa developed a type style using handwriting samples from Mirry herself, and visual imagery from the collections that Simon and Tom unearthed and curated. Simon’s daughter Lily Tong then took individual lettering and applied it to the imagery. Album design is by Kathy Kielty, with sleeve content design by Neil Munro
Eleonora Dalla Rosa said: “The wonderful original old photographs and stereoscopic images from Mirry's time gave us a unique opportunity to portray this talented woman and her music through the places and moments from
her past. We used those visuals and footage across the website, record cover, and social media to visually rebuild and rediscover Mirry's precious and reserved world. I think the work reflects the bucolic and dreamy style of her music.
For the "Mirry" logotype we mixed and matched letters from her own original calligraphy to create once again a mark that feels personal and intimate and that gently reveals more of the character and soul of the musician”
