1/4/2024 0 Comments 99 percent invisible bookWith wartime restrictions on materials, the company made a deal: 60 tons of paper a month in exchange for hundreds of thousands of books for troops. During WWII, they printed guides on how to keep small animals for food and identify passing airplanes (both friend and foe). Over the years, Penguin stayed ahead of the game, adapting to the times. Many of these borrowed heavily from the original cover and logo design work of Edward Young as well as subsequent refinements by Jan Tschichold. Subsequent spinoffs included Pelican Books (an imprint aimed to educate rather than entertain) as well as Puffin Books (non-fiction picture volumes aimed at children). Pelican book covers, from left to right: 1937 (three bands), 1955 (grid), 1969 (illustrated), and 2007 (a “Penguin Celebrations” throwback edition). Keeping with tradition, they kept coding by color, but this time to indicate the original language of a given work. Penguin was able to fund new art in part because the Classics series featured many royalty-free works, including titles like Homer’s Odyssey (translated to English). His design philosophy stressed the importance of white space as well as clear typographical hierarchy, building on and refining Penguin’s existing visual strategies. He also came up with a new “vertical grid” approach and drafted the publisher’s first internal type guide for editors and composers. German typographer Jan Tschichold came on board and began making woodcut illustrations for a spinoff series of Penguin Classics. Within a year, the company had printed a million copies and began to expand into various subseries.ĭesign continued to guide the growing company’s course. Initially, conventional booksellers were wary of this new approach, but Lane managed to make a deal with Woolworths to fund an initial run and prove its potential. This simple approach helped make Penguin books look uniform while also being cheap to produce and easy to distinguish from other volumes. Gray with elegant font for world affairs.In his “horizontal grid” format, colored stripes above and below (that also wrapped around the side) signaled the genre of book: In the center of each cover, the author and title were printed in black Gill Sans against a white background. Described as “an employee who happened to know how to sketch,” he also drew the first iteration of Penguin’s iconic flightless bird.Įschewing bold, eye-catching illustrations, this upstart British publisher went with color-coded volumes. At the time, paperbacks were largely associated with lurid pulp fiction, and their covers showed it.įollowing the vision of Penguin founder Allen Lane, a young graphic designer named Edward Young helped develop a novel format. Launched in 1935, Penguin Books aimed to bring serious softcovers to the masses at an affordable price, but to do that they needed to differentiate themselves through design.
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