Joe Gilmore book design highly commended at awards

Joe Gilmore’s book design for Daphne Oram: An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, by Anomie Academic has been highly commended at the British Book Design and Production Awards 2017.

Gilmore is Teaching Fellow in Graphic Design on the BA Graphic and Communications Design programme. His practice focuses on book design for artists, art galleries and international institutions.

Daphne Oram: An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics was first published in 1972. Oram was a composer and co-founder of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop who composed pioneering electronic music in the 50s and 60s.

In 1957 she developed ‘Oramics’, a technique for converting images into sound. The re-design of the out-of-print original book contains new, unpublished photographs from Oram’s archive and an introductory essay by Sarah Angliss.

“I was commissioned by The Daphne Oram Trust and Anomie to re-design the book which was originally published in 1972. I have an artistic practice, working with computer music and sound and I think this knowledge and experience played some part in me being commissioned for the project” comments Gilmore.

“I am really pleased that the book was shortlisted and that it was highly commended at the awards ceremony in London. It was an honour to re-design this prestigious book by a composer who was not only one of the first in Britain to work with electronic sound, but who also pioneered the synthesis of music through drawing.”

“The book is quite technical — and somewhat esoteric in places — and the 1972 publication featured numerous glyphs and diagrams which were all hand-drawn by Oram. For this edition, all of the glyphs and diagrams were recreated digitally, and the texts were further embellished with rare, unpublished photographs from Goldsmiths Special Collections and Archives, London,” added Gilmore.