Delia Derbyshire and the Charity
Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) was a pioneering electronic composer. With the BBC Radiophonic workshop she worked on the electronic arrangement of the first Doctor Who theme tune. Delia's archive started in 2007, and lives at John Rylands Library on Deansgate, Manchester.
Delia Derbyshire Day is a Manchester-based charity that celebrates the work of Delia, through workshops and events. This year to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, we the charity are celebrating Delia’s arrangement of the theme through oral history sessions, interactive school works and artist commissions.
The Commission
Throughout Autumn Delia Derbyshire Day will be delivering a series of workshops in primary schools across Manchester. These will involve making an electronic wobbulator instrument (from a solderless circuit board), learning about the history and work of Delia and Doctor Who, and the production of a film starring the school children.
They would like to make a poster and certificate to give the schools to thank them for their involvement in the workshops. The certificates will be given to each individual student to congratulate them for participating and to commemorate the 60th anniversary. Ideally, each child will cherish their certificate, take it home to their family and tell them all about it. Ultimately, with the hope this memento it may inspire future Delia's.
The poster will be given to the classes to pin up in their classrooms and to be used as an inspiration for involvement in music, culture and STEM. This is particularly important due to a lack of representation of female-identifying people in electronic music and audio industries.
A1 Poster
For this outcome they wanted a large image of Delia in the centre of the poster (photos are copyrighted, but there are illustrations created by previous graphic designs which are used on our website and could be used with permissions from the original artists. The artwork used in this poster was created by local artist Kara Blake with permission granted to edit the artwork to incorporate it into the composition.
Because Delia used tape reels in her work, they wanted reels of tape to curl around the poster and include the text in the loops around the reels. Colour palettes were drawn from the Delia Derbyshire Day website plus Doctor Who generally. TARDIS blue is ruling this year.
The posters are for primary school children (largely Year 5 and 6) so it was important to keep it keep it bright and fun, and easy to read. Avoiding a white background is useful for people with dyslexia so this was considered throughout the design process.
A4 Certificates
The purpose of the certificate were to celebrate the work of the children for both Oral History workshops and Inspiration day workshops. Bright and appealing colours were again used to link it to the main A1 poster and to make the certificates eye-catching and be something for the children to cherish and take pride in. The children's’ drawings of the TARDIS, space and time were incorporated into the background of the certificate to highlight their importance and allow the children to take pride in their own work.
