Beautiful, diverse poster archive from east London's Chats Palace Printshop

If there’s one thing we love more than really beautiful poster design, it’s really beautiful retro poster design. And we are able to feed our insatiable appetite for this kind of graphic design thanks to a fascinating project celebrating an east London legend. Chats Palace in Homerton, Hackney, was originally a library but after that closed it was claimed by the local community as a social and cultural hub that supported music, comedy, theatre, dance, carnival, disability arts, photography and other programmes.

Now Asya Gefter and Peter Young have launched a project aiming to document its history and celebrate its contribution to the area’s past. They’ve got an excellent blog and we were bowled over by these posters from the Chats Palace Printshop which was opened by Rene Rice in 1977. Over 21 years this silkscreen and offset lithographic printing workshop produced not only the Palace’s in-house printed matter but also the posters for a host of local organisations as eclectic as the community itself.

This is the sharp end of graphic design – low-budget posters aimed at a very localised audience and yet the composition, use of colour and type is uniformly wonderful. This archive is a real treat and a true part of east London’s design heritage.