Product Description

By looking back at seventy years of Penguin paperbacks, graphic designer Phil Baines charts the development of British publishing, the ever-changing currents of cover art and style, and the role of artists and designers in creating and designing the Penguin look. Rich with stunning illustrations and filled with details about individual titles, designers, and even the changing size and shape of the Penguin logo itself, Penguin by Design shows how covers become design classics.

Features 600 color illustrations

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #345423 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Phil Baines, a senior lecturer at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, is a well-known graphic designer. His books include Type & Typography.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful & illuminating
I picked this up because of the book's physical beauty, but I've just read it in one sitting, couldn't put it down--a fascinating window into 20th-century British cultural history as well as book design.

Covering creativity
What a loving tribute to Allen Lane, the visionary who founded Penguin Books in 1935. Few publishers have consistently put their best `face' forward year after year over thousands of titles and I find it surprising that this Penguin cover history hasn't been written before 2005.

Admittedly most of their covers until the Fifties, though distinctive in the three-tier horizontal design, were not that creative but things slowly changed no doubt because of market pressure from other paperback publishers. I thought Penguin covers really took of in 1962 with the use of Romek Marber's simple cover grid. Pages 104-5 in the book show eighteen brilliant covers using simple graphics with black, green and red inks. The grid cover style ran into the seventies with the non-fiction Pelicans and nicely still using everybody's favorite type: Helvetica.

Author Phil Baines has done a lot of research for the book though it is basically visual with excellent short text pieces for the various title genres. A nice touch is spread of forty-eight Penguin logos from 1935 to 2005 at the back of the book and it is this kind of editorial thoughtfulness that makes the book so interesting.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

A treasury
Penquin books have been a great joy ever since I discovered them in college many years ago. This fine collection is a trip down memory lane with beautiful designs and intriguing hints of the pleasures inside.

It's wonderful to see that so many of the books are still in print. An excellent sampling of the covers, including the ability to blow them up for closer inspection, appears on the Penquin Books website.

Also, my thanks to Robin Benson for his illustrations here on Amazon; they sold me on buying the book. Well done!

Robert C. Ross 2009