Groove

Groove Archive holds one of the most complete private collections of African popular music on vinyl — thousands of pressings, sleeves and session notes gathered over four decades. The collection was legendary among collectors and invisible to everyone else. The brief: open it to the world without flattening what makes it special.

The studio directed the full digital expression — naming refinements, a typographic voice drawn from record-sleeve lettering, and a browsing experience built around eras, regions and grooves rather than search bars and filters.

Instead of a database wearing a website costume, Groove was art-directed like an exhibition. Each record page pairs high-resolution sleeve photography with session histories, pressing details and curated playlists. A warm, ink-on-paper palette keeps long reading sessions comfortable; oversized serif titles give every release the presence of a gallery label.

Motion was kept deliberate — slow crossfades between sleeves, a tone-arm-inspired audio player — so the interface feels like handling records, not querying rows.