Penguin Books Great Ideas Series, Volume III (Green)
| July 03, 2008

I’ve loved the design of Penguin UK's Great Ideas series, and the cover designs for volume III look like they keep in line with my high expectations. I’m interested to know more about the designer's approach to conceptualizing each cover in the series. I read that “each is set in a manner suggestive of the lettering or typography of the time of the work’s first publication.”*

Taking this further, does every cover in the series reference a specific classic design from the past? For example, the cover for The Fastidious Assasins by Albert Camus instantly recalls Alvin Lustig's design for The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Alistair Hall gives a little more insight on this.



Old Penguin style conventions are used on a few covers in the new volume—which I love with the tactile touch of debossed type and uncoated stock. It would be fascinating to see each new cover design up against the historical graphics that influenced them .

Below is  in regards to the first volume of Great Ideas from 2004:

“Editorial Director Simon Winder came up with Great Ideas as a way of introducing a different readership to key texts that have helped civilization. Art Director Jim Stoddart handed responsibility for the design to David Pearson, who decided to let the flavour of each individual text influence the look of its cover.”*

Volume III in the Great Ideas series will be published on August  7, 2008. David Pearson, Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon and Alistair Hall contributed cover designs to the latest volume (I discovered AlistairH's Flickr photos via Kottke).

Credits for covers shown here:

Cover design for Walter Benjamin / The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction  by David Pearson.
Cover design for George Orwell/Books v. Cigarettes by David Pearson.
Cover design for The Fastidious Assassins by David Pearson.

*taken from Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, by Phil Baines

Link:  Alistair Hall's Flickr Set of Penguin Great Ideas

Tags:  book covers, design, letterpress, paperback

Topic: Book Cover Design