Talking Archives
Visual identity for an oral history archive of voices and their silences.
Context:
Talking Archives collects recorded testimony: interviews, room tone, the long pauses people leave before a difficult sentence. The material is intimate and uneven, and the task was an identity that could hold it without flattening it into a neutral institutional voice or dramatising it into something the recordings never were.
Creative idea:
The identity treats the pause as the subject. Spacing, not ornament, carries the meaning: type is set with intervals that behave like breath, and the gaps are allowed to stay visible instead of being closed up.
Design approach:
A quiet text serif does the reading, and a mono face marks anything machine-made — timecodes, durations, file names — so the human and the recorded stay separable. The palette is nearly absent: paper, ink and one warm tone that appears only where a listener can act. Waveforms are used sparingly, as evidence rather than decoration, and never as a background texture.
Outcome:
A system that lets the recordings speak first. The identity stays legible across the listening interface, the printed catalogue and the exhibition walls, and it holds the same restraint in each.
