MY MY MY

Penguin Great Ideas IV

For anybody not familiar with the Penguin Great Ideas series, it's a series which brings together some of the most influential texts ever made, from the minds of the worlds greatest thinkers; from Confucius and Plato, to Darwin, Rousseau, Woolf and Orwell, to name just a few. They're the kind of books that you would read in a public place if you wanted to try and make yourself look 'oh-so-sophisticated' in front of everybody else.

However, the books could be full of anything, complete nonsense even, I think I would still want to buy them, because of their incredible covers. The idea originally started out as one set of 20 books, and they used the colour red to tie the set together and create a visual consistency for the covers. The books were all printed using only two colours, red being the spot colour, and black being the only other they could use, printed on to white stock. It's always a challenge designing for print in just two colours, but the end results were fantastic. The different illustrations and use of type on the covers help each book to remain interesting and unique, whilst the two colour treatment really ties the books together to create a set that is visually stunning. The covers are a very tactile experience, they are printed on smooth matte paper, and feature heavy embossing. They're the kind of books you want to run your fingers over, and jpgs really don't do them much justice.

Four covers from Penguin Great Ideas Volume I

Due to the success of the first set of 20 books, Penguin decided to release another set, again featuring black and white covers, but this time using blue as the spot colour.

Penguin Great Ideas Volume II

As well as the covers, the spot colour is also used on the spines of the books, volume one all having red spines, volume two with blue ones, which means they look fantastic when they're lined up on your bookshelf. Moreover, the spines are numbered, which is brilliant from a marketing point of view, because once you've got a few, you're no longer content with just seeing the numbers 2, 3, 7, 15 and 20 on your bookshelf, you want to buy the rest so you can have the full numbers 1-20 staring back at you.

The numbered spines which are a book collectors dream come true

In September last year they released volume three, choosing to feature green as the spot colour. David Pearson, the man behind the Great Ideas series, comments on the choice of colour:

"Green’s not a selling colour. It’s much harder than finding the right red or blue. Most reds sit nicely against black or white; green doesn’t have that presence. [...] I was getting more confident as a designer, so the decisions were getting bolder. This series is more image-led – getting rid of some of the white and flooding the cover with information. Predominantly white covers (with the green) would be a bit vague."

(Creative Review, August 2008)

Penguin Great Ideas Vol III

Close up of Orwell's Books vs. Cigarettes cover

Green spines from Vol III

And now of course it's time for volume number four. Having already used red, blue and green, this time they've gone for purple, and what a great shade of purple it is. So far they've only revealed the first ten covers, out of 20 in the set, but I think they're possibly the best yet.

Penguin Great Ideas Vol IV

Talking about the latest set of books, Pearson says:

"The formula is now so familiar to us that the main struggle is really an internal one and that’s for us to move the series somewhere new each time. Across this many titles each cover has to be distinct enough to maintain interest and – I hope – the boundaries we originally set ourselves have allowed enough flexibility to do this. There will always be a part of me that feels slightly sheepish at having produced so many of these things (80 so far) but much more so, I feel incredibly lucky to be working on a project that taps into the very specific skills I do have (and not the myriad that I do not)."

(Book Cover Archive, August 13th 2009)

Personally, I believe this cover would have to be my favourite out of the whole lot:

David Pearson has also announced that there will indeed be a fifth, and final, set, scheduled for release in 2010 to coincide with Penguin's 75th birthday. I cannot wait to see what colour they choose next.

For more information, and to view the full set, check out the ever wonderful Book Cover Archive.

I Like Classical Music, Therefore I Hate Good Design

As far as I can tell, every classical music album comes with terrible packaging design as standard. A mix of horrendous typography, accompanied by generic photographs of instruments, composers, or in the worst cases, both. These are some of the most amazing, most celebrated pieces of music ever made, so why don't they deserve good design?

Four equally dire Mozart covers

Don't even get me started on the many problems I have with this album cover:

Mozart for your baby. Indeed.

Perhaps it's simply that the record companies want to keep the album art 'refined' and 'sophisticated' in order to differentiate it from the other music found on the shelves of record shops, or increasingly on the pages of internet shops like Amazon. Just glancing at the covers, you can instantly tell that these are classical albums; they're certainly not rock, dance, pop music, or anything else. However, album covers that are trying to look too sophisticated and pretentious run the risk of deterring new listeners. I don't know anybody my own age would even consider buying a classical album, yet I'm willing to bet that it's not because of the music itself, it's because the packaging makes it look like you're only supposed to purchase it if you're past retirement age.

Four Chopin album covers

Classical compilation albums are no better in terms of design

Upon seeing all these vexatious examples of bad design, I soon found myself eagerly trying to search out some examples of good classical album covers. I found a very interesting Flickr set full of classical music albums, all on vinyl, from the 1950s. The covers are full of bold colours and shapes, and some delightful illustrations which really sum up the style of design at the time. It's very far removed from the kind of illustrations we are used to seeing on album covers today.

Vinyl covers from the 50s

So if classical albums came with good design in the 50s, at what point did it all start to go wrong? I took Gustav Holst's 'The Planets' as an example, and started looking at how the album covers have changed over the last half a century.

1950s

1960s

1970s

1990s

2000s

In my opinion the 50s is still the best example, but the one that intrigues me the most is the one from the 70s. Even if it's not a great album cover, it's great to see at least one example that steers clear of the all too obvious pictures of planets, and instead tries to approach the subject of outer-space and otherworldliness from a different angle.

Finally, I did manage to find one example of a classical music album that I thought had a great design. Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), part of Wagner's opera, which culminates with the apocalyptical ending of the earth by raging fires and then floods, which wipe out both human civilization and the Gods. It would have been all too easy for the designer to simply place a picture of fire, destruction, Gods, or similar imagery on the front, but instead they went for a clean layout with a good visual hierarchy, a clever image, and some good typography to match (the only negative aspect is the record company's insistence on putting their logo in the corner). I'd like to see more covers like this, and fewer pictures of dusty old composers and their violins.

Die Götterdämmerung

For further examples of good, bad, and some slightly ridiculous classical album art, see these articles on the allmusic blog and the Too Many Tristans blog.

A Little Too Similar?

Illustration is an area of design that I have become particularly interested in over recent years, and one of the first illustrators that I really admired was Mr. Bingo, who became famous for his Hair Portraits, depicting people/characters by drawing nothing but their hair. The results are humorous, and I'd never seen anything quite like it before; I loved the way that the hair was drawn in such detail, and that nothing else was needed to recognise the people depicted in the portraits.

'A New Hope' featuring Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Hans Solo, and Chewbacca from Star Wars.

And 'Thinkers', which features the hair of Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and I'm not sure about the last two, but I believe them to be Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

However, since discovering the talents of Mr. Bingo, I've discovered a number of other illustrators who appear to have a very similar style. In some cases, a little too similar. For example, this poster from Christina Christoforou, which is a "tribute to bands and their hair" (for sake of comparison, see Mr. Bingo's Guns 'n' Roses print).

Christina Christoforou

And it seems I'm not the only one to have noticed this; Mr. Bingo himself is keen to point out plagiarisms of his work via his Twitter feed. He recently highlighted the similarities between his own work and that of Toby Triumph. Toby is another illustrator whose work I particularly like, but the comparisons between the two illustrators are inevitable, as they both create detailed line drawings with ever so slightly wobbly/wonky lines which give the work that delightful hand-drawn feel that you don't get from straight lines and smooth curves.

To compare, here's the two side by side:

Mr. Bingo

Toby Triumph

And another, even more undeniable similarity:

Mr. Bingo

Toby Triumph

Now so far it sounds like I'm siding with Mr. Bingo, however, that is only because I personally discovered his work before I found that of Toby Triumph. To be fair to them though, I have no idea who created their work and their style first, or if indeed there is any plagiarism taking place at all, or whether the similarities are simply a rather strange coincidence. But it doesn't stop there, I've stumbled across countless illustrators who produce very similar work, all with the same hand rendered, black line drawing style:

Mr. Bingo

Damien Weighill

Richard Hogg

Andrew Rae

Now if I didn't know better, I would no doubt assume that all four of the above images had been created by the same illustrator. But of course they're not, and I have to admit that when I'm drawing, I often find myself adopting this style of illustration myself.

So why is this style of drawing popular with so many different illustrators? Perhaps it's simply because it looks good, perhaps it's because it's relatively easy to draw this way, or perhaps it's because it's a natural progression from the cartoon style line drawings we all do as children. Personally, I love this style of drawing, but with so many illustrators adopting it, I wonder if it will be long before it starts to lose it's charm, and we see a new illustration trend emerging.

Give It The Typographic Treatment

I love this idea from Cardon Copy. Taking hand made flyers/posters found on the street, attached to lamposts, etc, and giving them the proper typographic and design treatment. In his own words:

"Cardon Copy takes the vernacular of self-distributed fliers and tear-offs we have all seen in our neighbourhoods. It involves hijacking these unconsidered fliers and redesignings them, over powering their message with a new visual language. I then replace the original with the redesign in it's authentic environment."

This is the result; a hand scribbled sign for a lost cat is turned into an effective, eye-catching piece of design: