When Penguin was founded in 1935 by the publisher Allen Lane, their aim of producing inexpensive paperback editions of high quality books was matched by an equally radical approach to typography and cover design.
Lane’s secretary suggested 'Penguin' as a name for the company and the office junior Edward Young was sent to sketch the penguins at London Zoo as its logotype. Young was then asked to design the covers of the first set of ten paperbacks to be published in summer 1935, including works by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. Considering illustrated book covers to be trashy, Lane insisted on his following a simple horizontal grid for Penguin’s jackets in colours that signified the genre of each book: orange for fiction, green for crime, and blue for biography.
The rigorous application of colour, grid and typography in those early paperbacks instilled Penguin with a commitment to design from the start. The company then strengthened its design ethos under the direction of the German typographer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) during the 1940s and the Italian art director Germano Facetti (1926-) in the 1960s.
Graphics, Branding and Typography at SoVibrant www.sovibrant.co.uk
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