I read Design Week’s feature on Penguin Creative, a department dedicated to the online design presentation of the house. To be clear, it has nothing to do with designing the covers. Penguin Creative’s Creative Director (a bit of a mouthful) Tim Lane said:
“Other companies talk about corporate responsibility. At Penguin, we talk about Creative Responsibility, because creativity is at the heart of everything we do.” And added: “Our team can apply an attention to detail you might not get from an external agency.”
On the same topic Penguin’s Art Director Jim Stoddart stated:
“I’m really proud of the way we’ve updated the brand by keeping a strong design component across our award-winning physical and digital products and it’s great to get recognition for that.”
Last week saw the launched of another set of Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’. David Pearson, a one-time Penguin inmate, responsible for the original look of the series a decade ago, was brought back to oversee the latest incarnation of 20 covers.
They all seem to fit in with the worthy statements of Lane and Stoddart. But there's another side to this 'design legacy' story.
Many followers of this blog will know that I have long been an observer of the special relationship between the book and its cover. It’s a passion that developed when I first joined a public library back in the 1950s. And that early interest was eventually responsible for my ending up in publishing for a decade.
Like many designers, I’ve always had a healthy regard for Penguin Books because of its design history and the many fantastic designers, illustrators and photographers who have graced the covers over very many decades.
For the past ten years, I have made regular visits to bookshops, be it an independent (not many of those still left) or Waterstones, Dillons or Daunt Books. While there, I scrutinise the covers of the latest publications. There’s nothing I like better than being among physical books. But I’ve noticed an increasing disparity in the design output of Penguin that verges on the schizophrenic and questions all those worthy statements above about “creative responsibility” and “creativity being at the heart of everything we [Penguin] do”.
It seems that far more design integrity, energy and even love go into the presentation of Penguin’s backlists, classics series and out-of-copyright works. Generally, new titles, in both fiction and non-fiction, get a raw deal on the design front or perhaps more accurately get more interference and the classic ‘design by committee’ syndrome coming into play. This raises the question: who is directing the creative direction?
This is most evident in new non-fiction titles, an area that Penguin, under their Pelican imprint, excelled in for so long – covers that were designed over 40 years ago still stand out as brilliant today. Take a look...
The above, and it's a tiny fraction of Pelican's output, are intelligent, ideas-based, beautifully executed and never an insult to potential reader's intelligence.
Sadly, not now, most new titles in non-fiction get the usual bucket-load of copy taking up every square inch of the cover...
And the same seems to apply to much of the new fiction too...
Even the great John le Carré’s latest work in its paperback edition get’s the dumbing down hard sell...
Frankly, you could have just printed ‘John le Carre’s New Book’ on the cover and I guarantee it would have been picked up immediately.
The examples I have shown above are not an isolated case. Month after month, year after year this kind of design presentation is the norm emanating from Penguin. And it's these covers that get displayed in a prime position on the tables of the major booksellers. Whereas all those lovingly crafted series and backlist classics get spirited away onto the shelves spine out. Leaving the true face of Penguin’s design output laid bare on the tables for all to see.
This Jekyll and Hyde approach to Penguin covers is never mentioned in any of the glowing articles pumped out. It begs the question why? You can't make grandiose statements like 'creativity is at the heart of everything we do' when it's clearly not. So who is really directing design?
There is no doubt in my mind that this increasingly heavy-handed approach to design will eventually spill over and erode all covers, and Hyde will win.
Magazines are another area where to find a breathing space on the cover these days is a rarity, unless it’s an indie magazine, and they tend to fold at an alarming rate. Happily, there are some outstanding exceptions. The New York Times Magazine maintains a brilliant, proper grown-up design standard. No one is doing it better at the moment.
So, I leave you with just a tiny sample of a pure run of beautiful design integrity from the NYT. Enjoy...