Cover Designs for Penguin Books: Great Ideas series

The original series concept and brief for 'Great Ideas' came from Penguin Press Art Director Jim Stoddart and designer David Pearson. They wanted something akin to title page designs contemporary with the writing of each title and to use a restricted colour palette. Catherine Dixon and I provided historical guidelines and suggestions about research resources and were commissioned, along with Alistair Hall, to design covers. Although a strong sense of history is suggested by the covers there is considerable variance in how strictly we observed particular models. Of my designs, Gibbon is an accurate recreation of John Baskerville's Holy Bible title page of 1763 but Marco Polo is a freer interpretation of some of the kind of text/image play. Although typographic covers for paperbacks are not new, the starkness of these designs, together with the accuracy of reference and quality of execution sets these apart from anything else in bookshops. The first series outsold expectations twenty-fold and the design team were nominated for the Design Museum's Designer of the Year Award in 2005. They won a D&AD Silver Award for Best Cover Design in 2005 and a nomination in the Typography category in 2006