Client: NUA Masters Project
Brief: Design an alternative exhibition guide to accompany the Gloucester shipwreck exhibition. Create an affordable and visually interesting keepsake guide.
16 page, full colour saddle-stitched booklet. Printed on GF Smith Gmund blocker perfect white (80gsm).
I wanted to draw attention to the links between the Gloucester shipwreck in 1682 and the slave trade. James, Duke of York, who survived the wreck, was governor of and principal shareholder in the Royal African Company, which held a monopoly on the English trade in enslaved people at the time. In the year the Gloucester sank, over 12,000 African men, women and children were transported across the Atlantic by the RAC, with those who survived the middle passage sold as slaves on the caribbean plantations.
The exhibition guide includes original artwork in the form of logotypes designed for some of the slaveships operated by the Royal African Company in 1682. My design work is research-led and is drawn from the incredible dataset of 12 million voyages available at : https://www.slavevoyages.org/
Texts in the exhibition guide copyright Prof. Claire Jowitt and Prof. William Pettigrew. Images in the catalogue copyright Norfolk Museums Service / Norfolk Historic Shipwrecks Ltd. With thanks.