Marber Grid Designs for three Penguin Classics

Marber Grid Designs for three Penguin Classics

Type 

Gill Sans was the typeface used for my penguin book cover design as it is also the typeface used on the original penguin book covers. This typeface is unfussy, practical, trustworthy and therefore is suitable for being used in this context.  Through referring back to existing penguin book covers, I positioned and scaled up the type accurately to fit the design of the original designs.

Penguin Book Covers 

“Many people I’m sure could recognize a Penguin book from the layout alone, simply because they’re so well recognized as ‘classic Penguin’ designs.”

Through research I found that the crime series was one of the penguin’s most popular and recognizable series through its design. Therefore, I choose three crime novels to design a cover for as I aimed to follow the design principles that cause them to be so recognizable. 

Following the rules of the Marber grid, using my chosen novels I practiced creating a visual and applying it to this layout, practically unchanged. My designs had to consider how they would work within the space the grid offers for imagery. Two thirds of the cover exists as the space in which the illustrative design will be placed, while the typographic information and the colophon sit within the top third of the page. 

The Marber grid template is overlapping my design above. This shows how I kept the layout consistent and accurately referred to the Marber grid. This process involved measuring out individual sections of the grid and placing my own content inside each space accordingly. My illustrative designs all were built around having a circular boarder, this was because I wanted the layouts to have a consistent symmetrical balance, by having the designs in a circular form they could then all be placed in the same point within the space the grid offers for imagery. As a series together the designs all cause its readers to navigate around the designs in the same