PENGUIN BOOKS COVER design consistency

By

Linh Nguyen

Bernadette Ho

DEVELOPMENT

Allen Lane found the company in 1935, with the objective to produce inexpensive paperpack editions of high quality books

Simple horizontal grid for Penguin’s jackets in colour that signified the genre of each book: orange for fiction, green for crime, and blue for biography

PENGUIN LOGO

Edward Young sketched the penguin, inspired by the penguins in the London zoo.

Tschihold (1946-1949)

• Designed a template for all Penguin Books with designated positions for the title and author’s name with a line between the two.

• Came up with ‘Composition rules’ to ensure that the same style was always applied.

Han Schmoller (1950s)

Schmoller made the change from horizontal to vertical grid in 1951

Germano Facetti(1961-1965)

• Redesigned ‘Penguin Crime’

• The redesign was so successful that Facetti adopted variations of it for other Penguin series

Germano Facetti(1961-1965)

Succeeded in establishing consistently high standards of inspiring and often provocative design in a systematic manner.

Comments about the design

"Penguin stood for a democratisation of design. It marked a change in perception, that design wasn't just for monied people any more.”

"There was an almost paranoid obsession with the brand"

- Phil Baines - professor of typography and author of ’Penguin by Design’

Comments about the design

"The grid was important as the rational element of control. The consistency of the pictures contributed, as much as the grid, to the unity of the covers, and the dark shadowy photography gave the covers a feel of crime.” (2007)

- Romek Marber, designer of the Penguin crime series in the 1960s

What makes Penguin Books covers so endearing?