Sound Waves: Music in Newham
Rendevouz Projects
Book Design
2025
Softback, 150mm x 210mm x 76pp
Book design for Sound Waves: Music in Newham by Rendezvous Projects, exploring 60 years of Newham’s musical heritage through oral histories, archival research and community collections.
The project brought together a huge amount of research: photographs, ephemera, and oral histories, gathered from across the borough. And so the design needed to work hard as a container for this material while feeling loose and energetic and not something visibly modular. I wanted the book to feel loose but held: to accommodate many voices without flattening them into a single narrative.
Over the course of the project, a highlight for me was seeing archival material from the Tom Allen Centre, a community centre in Stratford in 1980/90s. Possibly budget constraints, possibly quick turnarounds, seemed to push the designs into unusual places, particularly in their use of colour, materials and production. I hoped the design of the Sound Waves book to carry something of the character of this material, informal, local and made for a community, rather than imposing a more polished visual language onto it.
The identity for the project uses a system of dots, each dot representing an area or ward of Newham, connecting the design back to the geography of the borough. There is an energy in that multiplicity which felt important to retain, the idea that social history is something collectively made, through individual memories, experiences and stories.
Archival material from the Tom Allen Centre, Stratford. Archive currently held in Stratford Library.
