Client: NUA Masters Project
Brief: Design a new visual identity for an exhibition of artefacts from The Gloucester shipwreck, as shown at Norwich Castle Museum in summer 2023.
I created a logo, an exhibition catalogue and alternative guide (zine) and a poster.
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 bottle, a cartouche from a 1675 map printed by John Seller shows the Royal African Company’s elephant and castle crest and a crude depiction of two African men.
My design practice is research-led. The logotype uses a font based on the Fell Types, a contemporary typeface created for the Oxford University Press in the decade before The Gloucester’s final journey.
The stippling is a recreation of the patina on a John Seller map from 1675, showing the sandbanks and mudflats around East Anglia which would have been used by those responsible for navigating the Gloucester.