Client: NUA Masters Project
Brief: Design a catalogue to accompany the Gloucester shipwreck exhibition featuring contextualising essays and images.
BLAD (book layout and design) inlcluding cover, title page, contents, sample spreads.
12 pages, full colour (HP Indigo Press) on 150gsm uncoated stock.
Final dimensions: 220 x 269mm (saddle stitched). UV spot-gloss varnish on cover.
I experimented with editorial design in the exhibition catalogue to incorporate images of artefacts that appear to have sunk to the sea floor. Image captions are diagonal, as if listing underwater.
I based my design on the links between the Duke of York, on board the ship when it sank in 1682, and the English slave trade. (The Duke was governor of and principal shareholder in the Royal African Company which at the time had a monopoly on the English trade in enslaved people.)
Without undermining the beauty of the barnacle-encrusted wine bottles recovered from the wreck site, my designs draw attention to the activities of the Royal African Company. Inside the wine bottle on the catalogue cover, a cartouche from a 1675 map printed by John Seller shows the RAC’s elephant and castle crest alongside a crude depiction of two African men.
The names of some of the RAC slave ships operating in 1682 appear in the waves of the catalogue header, as visual reminders of entirely different journeys made by sea in the year The Gloucester sank.
My design is research-led. I drew on information from https://www.slavevoyages.org/ , an incredible dataset of voyages of more than 12 million African people who were sent across the Atlantic in slave ships.
Texts in the catalogue copyright Prof. Claire Jowitt and Prof. William Pettigrew. Images in the catalogue copyright Norfolk Museums Service / Norfolk Historic Shipwrecks Ltd. With thanks.