Hasta La Ideas

Uncle Grey Denmark has turned the common fly poster into a musical instrument to promote a new mobile app by headphone brand Urban Ears.

The interactive poster – launched to promote DJ mixing app Slussen – is made of 3mm thick vinyl engraved with ridges that emit a sound like scratching a record when scratched with a fingernail.

The combination of ridge patterns means different parts of the poster make different sounds, allowing users to make their own mixes using proper DJ techniques – as this video on the making of it explains (below).

Uncle Grey placed hundreds of the posters around Copenhagen last month. Most have since been stolen by light-fingered vinyl lovers and they’ve proved so popular that the agency is considering selling them.

“They were going to be a one-off but we’ve had a lot of requests from people asking where they can buy them, so we’re thinking about putting more into production,” says Jon Goldtsche Jørgensen, a senior art director at Uncle Grey who worked on the project.

CR blog readers might remember that last month, Trapped in Suburbia also released an interactive poster that emits sounds like a musical instrument when touched. Uncle Grey’s audio experiment was designed to target a young audience that is used to seeing gig and album launch posters plastered around their city.

“The fly poster is a pretty good medium for promoting music but we wanted to reinvent it and transfer the interactivity of the app onto traditional analogue media,” says  Goldtsche Jørgensen. “A lot of them have been stolen but that’s great for an urban brand – it means people like them enough to go to the trouble of taking them,” he adds.

As part of Slussen’s launch campaign, Uncle Grey also installed the posters and a microphone at a university in Copenhagen, allowing students to test their mixing and beat boxing skills after lectures.

The high-pitched sounds of scratch vinyl may not be music to everyone’s ears but but following its success in Copenhagen, Uncle Grey is considering launching the poster in other cities and at festivals. “There are no definite plans yet, but we’re working on it,” says  Goldtsche Jørgensen.

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

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