Anatomy of Design

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ANATOMY OF DESIGN

For the seventieth anniversary of the illustrious paperback publisher Penguin

Books, the idea to make a boxed set of seventy unusual short stories by

luminaries from their backlist, such as Anton Chekhov (“The Kiss”), F. Scott

Fitzgerald (“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”), H. G. Wells (“The Country of the

Blind”), Hunter S. Thompson (“Happy Birthday, Jack Nicholson”), John Updike

(“Three Trips”), and Muriel Spark (“The Snobs”), opened a wealth of design

opportunities to draw from design history but also build a new legacy.

Penguin, founded in 1935 by Alan Lane to provide high-quality content

as inexpensively as possible, has enjoyed a significant place in the annals of

design. As Phil Baines notes in

Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935–2005, the

name Penguin was chosen as “dignified, but flippant,” and the penguin logo,

created by Edward Young, who sketched penguins at the London Zoo, was a

playful counterpoint to the serious literature. Yet this humor was in stark

contrast to the solemnly tasteful book covers. Rather than using conventional

illustrations, Lane preferred a simple, cohesive horizontal grid for Penguin’s

covers, printing in colors that signaled the genre of the book: orange for fiction,

green for crime, and blue for biography. Starting in 1946, the German

typographer Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), who codified the radical New

Typography, introduced an even more disciplined approach. Eschewing

asymmetry, Tschichold established a central axis template that designated

where the title and author’s name would always appear.

Baines notes that he unified the design of the front, spine, and back and

redrew the Penguin mark in eight variations for the different book genres. He

also produced rigid composition rules used to keep designers from swerving off

course and persuaded Lane to incorporate illustration on the jackets of sets of

books, such as the Shakespeare Series.

In the early 1960s, Penguin appointed the Italian art director Germano

Facetti (1928–2006) as its new head of design. Facetti enlivened the old

Penguin formula with the introduction of more eclectic designs by Alan Fletcher,

Colin Forbes and Derek Birdsall, Robert Brownjohn, and Bob Gill. While

maintaining Penguin’s identity, in keeping with the times, covers turned into

lively mini-posters, and the basic ethos continues to this day. For the seventieth

anniversary, the idea was to wed tradition with contemporary while retaining

the publisher’s exclusivity.

Every volume in this extensive set has the same dimensions, and

although each cover has a unique image, the spines are uniform. The Penguin

logo aligns on the bottom while the author and title (at different line lengths)

hang from the top. Yet what truly ties this together—and gives it a striking

contemporary aura—is a swath of prismatic color that spreads from light to

dark across the row of spines.

A precedent for this look is simply the split-fountain printing technique,

whereby two colored inks are poured on either end of printing rollers and

merge as the press accelerates, obtaining the appearance of more color

combinations. It was frequently employed during the 1960s in underground

newspapers and on posters (to save color costs) and also occurred at the turn

of the twenty-first century on book covers, annual reports, and other printed

objects to give the illusion of many hues. The prismatic coloration also has an

even more contemporary association: The distinctive shine of a compact disk

has become symbolic of the computer era.

This sequential spine conceit also has precedents dating to the 1925

Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, where Art

Deco was introduced to the world with the fair’s multivolume catalog. Here the

book title stretched across twelve spines. Since then, designers have employed

this impressive method with typography as well as photography and illustration.

The final but no less important component of this series is the Penguin

anniversary logo, which adheres to a basically clichéd convention of using the

numerals as a frame for an institutional logo. Like Playboy’s fiftieth and the

United Nations sixtieth anniversary logos, the zero in the Penguin seventy

includes the venerated mascot.

Penguin Books

Designer: John Hamilton

2005 Penguin 70th Anniversary Pocket Penguins, book collection

d: John Hamilton

For the seventieth anniversary of the illustrious paperback publisher Penguin

Books, the designer made a boxed set of seventy unusual short stories.

Rainbow

Penguin logo development

Anniversary logos

Creative spines