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Published July 30, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Today is Penguin’s 75th Birthday! Happy Birthday Penguin.

Tony Lacey, Publishing Director of Penguin, discusses the Penguin Decades series:

And The Guardian interviews Penguin Chief Executive John Makinson, who sounds pretty pleased with himself (Penguin just announced record-breaking half year results):

“[E-books] redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us,” he says. “Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers.” Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: “I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn’t come naturally to book publishers.

In other news…

Copy Writer from the Dark Side — Author Will Self (Liver) discusses advertising with Gordon Comstock for an interview the Creative Review:

I straighten my dog collar and point out some of the things we might have in common, the novelist and the adman. The love of epigrams, the twisting of cliché, the use of animals behaving uncannily – all Self tropes, all things that a copywriter might well have in his book.

It’s a notion I can imagine certain writers would bridle at, but Self only nods philosophically, “Well, maybe I am a copywriter that’s gone to the dark side, I don’t know.”

Wonder Woman Returns — Kate Beaton goes all superhero and shit at Hark! A Vagrant. Kate is now also selling prints directly from her site and from TopatoCo.

And finally, on a related note and because it’s Friday,…

Lady Gaga Kidnaps Commissioner Gordon:

Supervillain Lady Gaga brazenly abducted Commissioner James Gordon from a charity fundraiser Tuesday, leaving police baffled and the citizens of Gotham fearing for their safety. Known for her outlandish costumes and geometric polygon hair, the criminal madwoman made a daring escape from Arkham Asylum last week and has been taunting authorities by interrupting television broadcasts ever since… While the kidnapping occurred at stately Wayne Manor, home of playboy jet-setter Bruce Wayne, the eccentric billionaire was not available for comment.

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Published July 22, 2010

Great Ideas Volume V

Penguin Great Ideas V David Pearson is posting the covers for the new Penguin Great Ideas series to Flickr. As you can see, they are stunning.

You can read my interview with David Pearson here.

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Published July 12, 2010

Penguin 75: Q & A with Paul Buckley and Christopher Brand

Launched with 10 titles by Allen Lane in 1935, Penguin Books turns 75 this year. To commemorate the anniversary, Executive VP Creative Director Paul Buckley has compiled Penguin 75, a collection of 75 book covers from the Penguin US archive.

Penguin 75 is an inside look at the Penguin design process with candid and irreverent commentary from authors, designers, editors and artists as well as Penguin Art Directors Darren Haggar and Roseanne Serra and Buckley himself. Filled with the kind of distinctive illustrative covers that are now associated with Penguin US, the book is wonderful slice of American book cover design. As Karen Horton recently noted in her interview with Buckley for design:related:

“Penguin 75… is less about the history of the old orange-spined paperbacks and more about the relationships Creative Director Paul Buckley helped to facilitate in the last decade between publisher, editor, author, and designer.”

I was lucky enough to talk to Paul and the book’s designer Christopher Brand about Penguin 75 last week.

How did Penguin 75 come about?

PB: I’ve always had a mix of fascination, disdain, and understanding, for what my staff and I go through in trying to get our work approved, as well as what the editors and publishers are dealing with on their end. Of course all people whose work is subjective go through some sort of approval process — and it’s not easy for the folks on the other end of the situation either; the ones saying “this is just not right”. As it’s something we do not hear much about (other than at some industry function), I thought it would be interesting to put some of these stories together in book form.

And how did you get involved in the project, Chris?

CB: I was working on staff at Penguin at the time. I let Paul know that I would be interested in working on it when he first mentioned the project to everyone. I mostly work on covers but I’ve had the chance to work on a few interiors before this one.

What criteria did you use to choose the covers?

PB: There were different sets of criteria; the most obvious being that they had to be Penguin paperbacks, as we had decided to use this project in conjunction with our 75th Penguin imprint anniversary. Another criteria was that I wanted to show recent Penguin work, so nothing older than 10 years or so. Then it came down to a combination of which covers look great and also have an interesting story associated with them, as well as trying to get a mix of intriguing authors and designers in there — not just your obvious fiction darlings, but a true microcosm of the publishing world and art world.

The covers are very different from the iconic Penguin paperback covers. Do you think the book shows a different side to Penguin’s design history?

PB: Of course. Penguin UK does a gorgeous job of tapping into the Penguin archive and history, and while I like to go there from time to time, I’m very interested in Penguin’s future in a different sort of way. The beautiful Penguin by Design is just not who I am, and if I tried to do a version of that, two things would happen — I’d fail as my heart would not be in it, and no one would buy it as it’s already out there in a few books. This is not to say that I’m not a huge fan of Penguin’s design history — I am, but I see it as a place to tap into occasionally, while still moving the brand forward — as nothing creative can remain as it was, nor should it if it wants to stat vital in it’s own day. But we do maintain Penguin’s age old love of illustrated and well crafted covers.

Do you have a sense that Penguin US has a design sensibility that is separate from the Penguin UK tradition?

PB: Whether you’re UK or US, it’s still Penguin tradition, so I don’t define it as you do. Both sides are very proud of Penguin, it’s history, it’s cache, it’s values — and both sides have built Penguin into what it is today, and what it stands for. So while we are separate entities that bring different things to the table, the overall strive to keep the quality bar set very high is paramount to either side.

Was it hard to choose just 75 covers?

PB: Unbelievably hard. That ate up the first month or so, just getting it down to 75, who was left in, who was left out, who on staff has five covers in, while another has only one or two, is it a good mix visually and editorially of this and that, etc etc.

Chris, did you have a say in any of the selections?

CB: Paul did an initial edit and went through tons of the books. Once he narrowed it down I helped a little bit with figuring out what we should put in, but mostly I would come to Paul later on when were trying to lay out the book. If we couldn’t get enough content for one of the books then we would have to find another one to put in. Or, if Paul wanted to add more books toward the end then we had to figure out what to subtract. I was more involved when it affected the design.

Were there any covers or comps that you wanted to include but couldn’t?

PB: By the nature of only utilizing 75 covers / series, things have to be left out. So yes, but only for that reason.

Penguin 75 includes contributions from authors and editors as well as designers, but I notice you left out Sales & Marketing!

PB: I did not leave out sales and marketing any more than I left out elves and leprechauns… I simply did not have any real sales and marketing stories. The Penguin marketing director, John Fagan, is hands down the best marketing director in the universe — we all know the horror stereotype stories of the marketing director killing this and that just to hear their own voices in the room, but John is so much an integral part of our team and loves what we are doing with our packaging; so unless he really thinks we’re missing something, he’s incredibly supportive; and when he does have something to say, he still manages to do it in a kind and intelligent way. Our sales team also leaves that stereotype behind. Trust me, you see in the book that I’m not pulling any punches and I made sure no one else in the book did either — so if I had great Penguin sales and marketing stories, you’d be reading them.

As a designer, were you surprised by any of the  comments from authors and editors about the cover designs, Chris?

CB: The range of comments from the authors was pretty surprising. Some were very thoughtful and you could tell they appreciate and understand book cover design. Other authors weren’t very happy with their covers and they made that pretty clear.

Was it fun to design a book about book design?

CB: More than anything, it was just fun for me to be working on the interior of a book instead of just the cover. It was a nice change.

Were there any unique challenges?

CB: The biggest challenge was that Paul and I were working on this book, but at the same time we both had full time jobs at Penguin. Paul tried to clear my plate for me a bit, but we both still had a lot of other responsibilities to deal with. Another thing that was hard was that we were sort of doing this whole thing on the fly. We were responsible for not just designing the book but gathering all of the content and all of the things that we needed to design the book (the comments, the hi-res art, etc.). We had to get everything together as we went and this stuff trickled in throughout the process.

On a design level, there was a lot of information to organize. It was challenging to come up with a system for everything. We had comments from that authors and designers, then there were comments from the art directors that we created another system for, all of the credit information for each book, we were showing alternative designs for some covers. There was a lot to think about.

Did you try to take account of Penguin’s design history while working on your design?

CB: I did take Penguin’s history into account at the beginning when we were figuring out what the layout should look like. I used Gill Sans throughout the book, but it’s pretty small and doesn’t feel overwhelmingly “Penguin”. I tried some things that were more in the style of older Penguin covers, but in the end we went with something more modern.

Was it strange to design a book that includes some of your own work?

CB: It was a little strange at first, but many of the covers in the book were designed by my co-workers so a lot of the work was very familiar to me.

So, did the book make you reconsider any of your own designs, or your design process?

PB: I’d love to sound thoughtful and say “yes” and expound on some brilliant new design wisdom — but the answer is “no”. All of the entries in this book are well known to me, and most have been for years. Putting them all down in one place just made me feel proud of what my department does — but I’ve always been incredibly proud of my team. If anything, it made me reconsider what it takes to put a book together, and see editors and authors in a more favorable light.

And, Chris, I have to ask… How does it feel to be immortalized on the cover of The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón?

CB: It was an amazing opportunity. I think this only the beginning of my modeling career.

Thanks Paul and Chris!

Images:

  1. Penguin 75 cover, design by Paul Buckley
  2. Penguin “Graphic Classics”:
    The Dharma Bums | Art Director: Paul Buckley |  Illustrator/Designer: Jason
    The Portable Dorothy Parker | Art Director: Paul Buckley | Illustrator/Designer: Seth
  3. Graham Greene Backlist | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Illustrator Brian Cronin
  4. Don Delillo Backlist:
    Americana     | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Photos: Jeff Brouws
    White Noise | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Photos: Jason Fulford
    Great Jones Street | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Photos: Hugues Colson (top), Tom Zimberzoff (bottom)
  5. Emporium and unused image | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley | Illustrator: Viktor Koen
  6. Special Topics in Calamity Physics | Designer/Art Director: Paul Buckley
  7. Pages 220 – 223  Penguin 75 | Designer: Christopher Brand
  8. Pages 244 – 247 Penguin 75 | Designer: Christopher Brand
  9. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby | Designer: Christopher Brand | Illustrator: Sam Weber | Art Director: Roseanne Serra
  10. The Jewish Messiah | Designer: Christopher Brand art Rodrigo Corral Design | Art Director: Darren Haggar
  11. The Shadow of the Wind | Designer: Tal Goretsky | Art Directors: Darren Haggar and Paul Buckley
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Published July 7, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

The Good, The Bad… — design:related‘s Karen Horton (also Art Director at Little, Brown and Co.) interviews Paul Buckley, Creative Director of Penguin US, about his new book Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (The Good, The Bad…):

Everyone was asked to keep their comments to 100 words or less, and though there are a few exceptions that I let run long, my own included, most contributors stuck to my request. As to the sarcasm, there are plenty of good natured jabs throughout the book as I was very clear with the participants that this was a true opportunity to let it all out – if you hate your cover, please by all means tell us about it; that is the point of this book.

You can read my interview with Paul from September last year here, and I’m hoping to chat with him and designer Christopher Brand about Penguin 75 soon. Fingers crossed.

Rewound and Remixed — Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, interviewed in The Times:

If McCarthy… presents a radically fresh prospect for the future of the novel, it is probably, paradoxically, because he has instinctively ignored contemporary literature almost completely. He would argue, in fact, that it is only by immersing oneself in all that has gone before that any contemporary novelist has even the faintest chance of coming up with something new. “I don’t think most writers, most commercial middlebrow writers, are doing that,” he says. “I think they’ve become too aligned with mainstream media culture and its underlying aesthetic of ‘self-expression’. I see what I’m doing as simply plugging literature into other literature. For me, that’s what literature’s always done. If Shakespeare finds a good speech in an older version of Macbeth or Pliny, he just rips it and mixes it.”

See also: My Q & A with Peter Mendelsund and Tom McCarthy about the cover design of C.

Paywalls vs. Potential — Clay Shirky interviewed in The Guardian. This has been much linked to elsewhere because of Shirky’s comments about the online “paywall” at the aforementioned The Times, but I actually Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair article on Rupert Murdoch from October last year is more interesting on this point. See also: John Gapper’s op-ed “Murdoch must become an elitist” in the Financial Times (registration required).

Necessary Agent — Jofie Ferrari-Adler, senior editor at Grove/Atlantic, on literary agents and their relationship with book editors in Poets & Writers Magazine. It’s an interesting article, although — just for the record — not everything that goes pear-shaped in the publishing process is the fault of the Sales & Marketing department…

And finally…

Cats Without Dogs — At some point I will shut up about Jason… Until then, you might be interested to know he has just started a blog…

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Published July 5, 2010

Jason, The Dharma Bums

As you may have noticed, I’m on something of Jason kick right now. I’m also preparing to interview Paul Buckley, Creative Director at Penguin US, about his new book Penguin 75, so I thought I would take the opportunity to post Jason’s beautiful contribution the Penguin Graphic Classics series that Paul art directed:

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Published May 28, 2010

Something for the Weekend

The charming illustrated cover for John Waters’ new memoir Role-Models by Eric Hanson, who also happens to be the author of A Book of Ages. Art direction on Role-Models by Susan Mitchell at FSG I believe.

And while we’re on the subject of nice book covers…

Isaac Tobin, senior designer at University of Chicago Press, talks to FaceOut Books about his witty cover for Adrian John’s Piracy. You can read my interview with Isaac here.

On the Dohle — PW takes a (slightly fluffy) look at Marcus Dohle’s first two years at the helm of Random House.

Allen Lane to Amazon — A nice audio slide-show history of British publishing in the 20th century at The Guardian.

And speaking of Allen Lane…

Puffin by Design: 70 Years of Imagination (1940 – 2010) seen at The Penguin Blog.

And Simon Houpt on Penguin’s 75th anniversary and their iconic brand in today’s The Globe & Mail:

Until a couple of days ago, Keir Hardie had no idea how many Penguin books he owned. For years he’d been collecting them informally, picking up a few at a time at second-hand shops. “Like a lot of fans, I grew up in a house with Penguin Books on the shelves,” he wrote in an e-mail this week, from his home in Inverness, Scotland. It was the books’ iconic design, he explained, that first grabbed his eye. “There was never much of a pattern to anything else, but the uniformity of the Penguins made them stand out.”

Indeed.

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Published May 22, 2010

Penguin RED

Penguin Press Art Director and designer Jim Stoddart talks about his design for the (Penguin Classics)RED edition of Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola:

Penguin designers Coralie Bickford-Smith and Stefanie Posavec also talk about their designs for series.

There’s more information about the videos and the (Penguin Classics)RED editions on the Penguin Blog and you can see all the covers of all 8 books on Flickr.

You can read my interview with the talented Ms. Bickford-Smith here.

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Published April 16, 2010

Something for the Weekend

John Squire‘s 1980’s covers for the Penguin Decades Series at The Creative Review. The art direction was by Penguin’s Jim Stoddart, but yes, it is THAT John Squire (i.e. awesome).

Fine Independent Publishing — An interesting interview with Barbara Epler, Editor-in-Chief at literary publisher New Directions, at KCRW’s Bookworm (although I could do without the decline of literature being blamed squarely on sales and marketing people. Again):

Permanent Crisis — A post by Rebecca Smart, Managing Director of military history publisher Osprey Publishing, at Digital Book World:

If you perceive that your only environment is that encompassed by your current supply chain then you’re only going to adapt to changes in that environment – so the response to the digital challenge viewed in this way would be to create and sell e-books. If you put the consumer at the heart of your thinking you can consider instead each group of customers you serve and what they might want on top of what you already provide, how they might want you to serve them differently in the future. More to the point, you can ASK them, listen and respond.

Proletarian Erotica — Lorin Stein, former senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and new editor of the Paris Review, interviewed at The Economist‘s ‘More Intelligent Life’ blog. The National Post also ran a nice interview with Stern last month.

Going Deutsch — Tom McCarthy, whose new book “C” I’m reading right now,  interviewed at the New York Times ‘Paper Cuts’ blog:

One critic described “Remainder” as a French novel written in English; well, by that token, “C” is my German novel. What the next one will be is anyone’s guess. Swedish, maybe…

More from Tom on The Casual Optimist soon (if I can twist his arm)…

Print Junkies — An interview at The Second Pass with the publisher and editor of Stop Smiling magazine J. C. Gabel on the launch if the Stop Smiling book imprint:

We’re still operating with the same mentality… but have adopted a Less Is More mindset — and a production schedule to match. It does feel nice to know that what we spend months or years working on is now being released in a permanent format. We’re really trying to reinvent the DIY aesthetic of the magazine to apply it to editing, publishing, and promoting books. The book-making process itself, of course, is much slower and drawn out, which is refreshing as we all get older.

And finally, I give you Oliver Jeffers’ moustache (via Tragic Right Hip)…

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Published April 11, 2010

Something for the Weekend

A couple of quick links…

‘Travel with words, meet the world’ — A nice typographic ad campaign from Penguin Books seen at Ads of the World (via This Isn’t Happiness).

No-Fi — Cartoonist James Sturm, founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies, is giving up the internet and documenting for Slate:

Over the last several years, the Internet has evolved from being a distraction to something that feels more sinister. Even when I am away from the computer I am aware that I AM AWAY FROM MY COMPUTER and am scheming about how to GET BACK ON THE COMPUTER. I’ve tried various strategies to limit my time online: leaving my laptop at my studio when I go home, leaving it at home when I go to my studio, a Saturday moratorium on usage. But nothing has worked for long. More and more hours of my life evaporate in front of YouTube. Supposedly addiction isn’t a moral failing, but it feels as if it is.

(For the sake of full disclosure, James Sturm’s new book Market Day is published by D+Q who are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast)

Jonathan Turner (AKA Insect54) has posted a few photos of Herbert Spencer’s book Pioneers of Modern Typography on his (amazing) Flickr photostream (via Inspire Me).

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Published January 29, 2010

Dan Mogford’s de Bonos

Earlier this week, London-based graphic designer Dan Mogford kindly alerted me to a series of fresh Edward de Bono covers he designed for the Penguin UK:

At the BPPA book cover panel last night, David Gee was lamenting publishers’ current predilection for blandly neutral Malcolm Gladwell-esque covers for certain kinds of popular nonfiction, and so I’m really glad that Dan (and Penguin) decided to go in the completely opposite direction.  I really like the slab serif (the rather lovely Stag by Christian Schwartz, Dan tells me), bold colours, and light-bulb motif they went with here.

Is it just me or do they have a certain Milton Glaser-like quality?

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Published December 14, 2009

Monday Miscellany

Kitsune Noir Poster Club — Artists Frank Chimero, Mark Weaver, Jez Burrows, Cody Hoyt and Garrett Vander Leun reinterpret their favourite books as prints for Kitsune Noir . (Frank Chimero’s Slaughterhouse Five is pictured above).

And on the subject of posters…

Penguin US have made the jacket art from Graphic Classic Editions of Moby Dick and White Noise, designed by Tony Millionaire and Michael Cho respectively, available as posters.

From Trolls to Truth — Author Ursula K Le Guin reviews Tove Jansson’s The True Deceivers (available in the US from NYRB Books) for The Guardian:

On the patronising assumption that books for children are nice, ie morally bland and stylistically infantile, critics, reviewers and prize juries often dismiss those who write them as incapable of writing seriously for adults… Anyone familiar with Jansson knows it would be unwise to dismiss her or patronise her work on any grounds. Her books for children are complex, subtle, psychologically tricky, funny and unnerving; their morality, though never compromised, is never simple. Thus her transition to adult fiction involved no great change. Her everyday Swedes are quite as strange as trolls…

Quote/Unquote Bookends designed by Eric Janssen (via SwissMiss).

And lastly…

In my total blogging tardiness, Bookslut (inevitably) beat to the punch on this, but Simon Reynolds column on the music of the decade for The Guardian has so much resonance for books and the book industry:

“The fragmentation of rock/pop has been going on as long as I can remember, but it seemed to cross a threshold this decade. There was just so much music to be into and check out. No genres faded away, they all just carried on, pumping out product, proliferating offshoot sounds. Nor did musicians, seemingly, cease and desist as they grew older; those that didn’t die kept churning stuff out, jostling alongside younger artists thrusting forward to the light. It’s tempting to compare noughties music to a garden choked with weeds. Except it’s more like a flower bed choked with too many flowers, because so much of the output was good. The problem wasn’t just quantity, it was quantity x quality. Then there was the past too, available like never before, competing for our attention and affection. The cheapness of home studio and digital audio workstation recording, combined with the wealth of history that musicians can draw on and recombine, fuelled a mushrooming of quality music-making. But the result of all this overproduction was that “we” were spread thin across a vast terrain of sound.”

(Update: links to Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver added)

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Published November 10, 2009

Q & A with David Pearson, Type As Image 

Penguin Great Ideas

Does British designer David Pearson really need an introduction?

Even if you don’t recognise the name immediately — and perhaps it is less familiar on this side of the Atlantic — then you will almost certainly recognise David’s type-driven design work: Penguin by Design by Phil Baines, Pocket Penguins, Penguin Great Loves, Penguin Great Journeys, Penguin Reference, and, of course, the astonishing Penguin Great Ideas series.

When the first set of Great Ideas titles arrived they looked like nothing else in the bookstore. Each cover was unique and yet they all fitted perfectly within the series. Their thick paper covers, limited colour palette and bold typography were clearly a wink to the design history of Penguin books (and perhaps the Arts & Craft movement) but also imaginative, playful, and starkly modern.

Since then, there have been three more sets in the Great Ideas series with a fifth on the way. David still works with Penguin, but has set up his own firm. He has designed covers for Éditions Zulma, and somehow found the time to help launch White’s Books.

David and I chatted over email…

Illustration by Michael Kirkham; design by David Pearson

How did you get into book design?

Whilst at college I was lucky enough to be offered a work placement by my Typography tutor, Phil Baines. The job was to design a large-scale art monograph for Phaidon Press and Phil walked me through every stage of the book’s production, from styling the edited manuscript through to the final layouts. I even got to run my designs past Alan Fletcher, who at the time was responsible for overseeing Phaidon’s visual output. This seemed like an absurdly privileged position for a student to be in. The first time I went to Phil’s studio he told me off for not aligning the letters on his hot and cold taps so you can imagine how fastidiously constructed my pages became under his tutelage. Before long I began to laugh at Phil’s funny ways and he in turn mocked my special design slippers. A friendship was born, nicknames were awarded and my first experience with books turned out to be an entirely lovely one. Moving into my third year, I knew that book design was for me and began to check Penguin’s website every week for job vacancies. For all sorts of obvious reasons I knew that I wanted to work for the company and made sure that I checked throughout my final year at college, desperate as I was to remain in London afterwards. I got lucky and landed a job as text designer (setting the insides of books) the day after I graduated.

This is a terrible question, but I’m curious: Which came first, your interest in Penguin’s design history, or designing books about Penguin’s design history?

Oh, absolutely the former. I was already an avid collector and the idea for a design retrospective was one that I’d run past my Art Director before it was eventually tagged onto the company’s 70-year anniversary celebrations. I’d always wanted to get into the archives and have a really good poke around and fortunately for me, this gave me the perfect excuse. If I was unaware of the magnitude of the company’s past achievements they very quickly became apparent as I worked my way through the vast isles of books.

The Penguin archive
Experimental layout from the Penguin archive

What was it like working with designer and typographer Phil Baines on Penguin By Design?

Having been given an enormous amount of freedom by the company (to personally manage the project) I found myself in a position where I could enlist an author. Phil seemed like the perfect choice because of his analytical and objective writing style. The last thing I wanted was a blinkered, frothing account of the company’s history because even a cursory glance round the archive revealed some decidedly dark periods. Phil and I keep very similar hours so the book took shape very naturally and it felt strangely normal to work through the night before heading to a pub together the following morning. Indeed, because there was no framework in place for our department to produce books of this kind, I had to rely on the goodwill of my Art Director, Jim Stoddart as I would design covers during the day and then the design book at night. The lines often became blurred and I was once asked to be escorted from the building as it was judged that I had not left for over two days. Phil is currently working on Puffin by Design, a partnering edition to Penguin by Design and as much as I would’ve liked to have been asked to work on it I suspect that we’re both better off that I wasn’t!

Artwork by Phil Baines; design by David Pearson

Your work on Penguin’s Great Ideas series won you a D&AD Yellow Pencil. What was the design brief for books?

Like all the good ones it was a happy blend of strict parameters (most notably in terms of budget) and creative freedom (there being no existing blueprint to adhere to or living authors to appease). The series’ success should be attributed to many different factors: Editor Simon Winder’s original idea was a great one, implying that world-changing thought and writing equates to Penguin, while the finished books seemed to fit a model of what people wanted from the company, a reaffirmation of Allen Lane’s original philosophy; but above all the publisher displayed an unfaltering level of confidence in the project and allowed us to break some fairly established rules in the process.

Artwork and design by David Pearson
Artwork and design by David Pearson
Artwork and design by David Pearson

The fourth series of Great Ideas has just been released. Was it difficult to create interesting new designs that were consistent with the previous two series?

Speaking from my own perspective I’d say that I’ve loosened up as a designer. Looking at my earlier efforts I think I was rather inhibited and it wasn’t until I brought in Phil that I could see the true size of the project’s potential. Phil added pace and variety through his very bold, expressive cover designs and this made me realise that I too could let my hair down a little.

Artwork by Joe McLaren; design David Pearson
Artwork and design by David Pearson

How is running your own studio different from working at Penguin?

There are certainly negative sides to being ‘out of house’. For example, I am no longer in a position to affect the approval of my work. Instead it has to very much stand up for itself, without the highly-sensitive designer attached. That said, I feel much calmer as a result. I may well still be in a honeymoon period but I’m enjoying managing every facet of my business – from doing the accounts to cleaning the windows. The rewards seem so much more tangible as a result.

Could you describe your design process for book covers?

Since the vast majority of what I do is type-driven, a fair amount of time is given over to researching letterforms. I am lucky enough to work just down the road from one of the world’s best typographic resources and thankfully they don’t mind me popping over to waste their time. Typophiles – in particular – can be a particularly unforgiving bunch and so time spent researching is never wasted.


Design by David Pearson

Design by David Pearson

What are your favourite books to work on?

Working within tight constraints is a blessing. There’s nothing quite so daunting as a completely open brief as you never get the feeling that you’re solving a problem, rather just satisfying your own whims. I always feel much more creative when my palette has been limited, either by the client or by myself.

Illustration and design by David Pearson

What are the most challenging?

Very simply, the ones that attempt to house more than one idea or repeat a sentiment. I think that book covers communicate quicker if they are boiled down to their most essential elements or rather, they have the best chance to communicate if they do one thing and do one thing purposefully. Confidence and a clarity of purpose are not found in abundance in trade publishing.

Illustration by Victoria Sawdon; design by David Pearson

Massimo Vignelli says that designers just need 6 typefaces. Should designers limit the number of typefaces they use?

Not at all. I am completely opposed to this view. While I appreciate that it takes time to fully understand and competently utilise a typeface I suspect that they all have a use for something. And doesn’t the use of such a limited palette suggest an unwillingness to shift from a preconceived agenda? This is all well and good if the client is buying into your look and trading from it but I would question whether this is a healthy starting point for someone working in the communications industry. Or, perhaps I’m just not enough of a Modernist to understand such an approach.

What are your favourite typefaces to work with?

I absolutely love Vendôme by François Ganeau and Roger Excoffon. Its over-emphasised, angular serifs brilliantly support its sensuous, bulking forms. I wasn’t in Paris in the Fifties, but Vendôme feels to me very much like Paris in the Fifties. Anything by the peerless Matthew Carter is a joy to use and I recently saved up to buy Martin Majoor’s Nexus family which I seem to be consistently delighted with.

From David Pearson's ephemera collection

Where do look for inspiration and who are some of your design heroes?

Like most book designers I have a healthy collection of ephemera; matchbox and travel labels being my favourite, and a huge chunk of my salary is redirected towards book buying. My design heroes are rather predictable, but for good reason I think. Jamie Keenan’s covers always seem so fresh and live long in the memory because they require a level of decoding. Jamie is also one of those rare designers whose work is just as effective on either side of the Atlantic. Hans Schmoller’s meticulous and elegant typography reassures me on a great many levels and I can’t quite manufacture enough situations where I am working with the immensely talented Joe McLaren. Then there’s the Penguin roll call: Curtis, Miles, Gentleman, Games, Marber, Birdsall, Robertson, Aldridge, Pelham and of course, Tschichold.

Design by David Pearson (not yet published/work in progress)

What does the future hold for book cover design?

It feels like this has been pretty well covered by people who are much more future literate than myself. All I can do, as a simple print designer, is live from day-to-day.

Design by David Pearson (not yet published/work in progress)

Thanks David!

You can see more of David’s work at his Flickr page and the David Pearson Design site.

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