Notes on Book Design

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At just 15 he followed the advice and took an Intermediate Examination (the equivalent of today's Foundation qualification for an undergraduate degree) in Lettering at The Wakefield College of Art. The Great Ideas and their bold typographic covers proved a great success, and the Penguin team responsible for the design was nominated for the Design Museum’s Designer of the Year in 2005. In the following years another four series were released, each with diverse and expressive covers yet also a coherent visual identity devised by Pearson. When I was at school, my (slightly hippy) parents helped turn a former churchinto a local communityarts centre. Stefan Sagmeisterstarted was a well-known designer in 1962 and is still one of the most influential and important graphic designers today. He was born and raised in Austria and currently resides in NY. He is known for famous works such as posters he did alongside the AIGA and other musicians like Lou Reed and David Byrne. Derek designed a cover for Roald Dahl’s collection of short stories Someone Like You, published in 1953. This would be the start of an illustrious career.

As I was coming up to leaving the Royal College of Art I was told I would never get a job and my tutors were all worried about my prospects. He was assigned to the army printing unit. To his dismay, on arrival he discovered the unit was now bereft of equipment due to the Suez crisis. He was concerned that he might be e e drafted off to something more physically taxing, but his commanding officer asked him if he was capable of drawing up plans. Despite having never done this, Birdsall said yes, he could. Morag Myerscough started Studio Myerscough in 1993, and has won many awards for her integration of graphics within architectural settings The Wakefield authorities, on finding out his age, insisted he continue in education for another 3 years, which is when he began to dabble in letterpress and found a job manufacturing cards for a local business. Designers are dependent on their “commission-givers” (opdrachtgevers: the Dutch word is better than our sleazy “client”). This is especially true in the case of a designer as sensitive and socially minded as Martens. In 1975 he found the client through and with whom he could develop out of the dead end. This was the Socialistiese Uitgeverij Nijmegen (SUN) – a publishing house with a clear commitment which had grown out of the Dutch student movement of the late 1960s, at first publishing stencil-duplicated texts. Now martens had the chance to work on a stream of books of real substance, with a consistently socialist alignment, produced on minimum budgets: ideal conditions in which to work out his critical Modernism. There was a geographical factor too: Martens has always lived in the province of Gelderland, which includes Nijmegen and Arnhem, and one might make a case for him as a “critical regionalist”, in the term of architectural critic Kenneth Frampton. The editor at the SUN who spotted him, Hugues Boekraad, also played a role in his work, as a lively, questioning partner. Boekraad’s progress has intertwined with that of Martens ever since.first commercial commission from Balding & Mansell printers in London. Balding & Mansell continue to print his work as a supplier

more magazine design and art-direction, including The Independent Magazine and the first issue of the Sunday Telegraph Magazine GTF, or Graphic Thought Facility, is a practice of three principal designers – Paul Neale, Andy Stevens and Huw Morgan – who share a collective spirit. In 1964 Birdsall moved to Covent Garden and in 1967 joined forces with Forsyth, who had left Pirelli to start a hybrid design consultancy that also handled advertising, called Omnific.A similar level of meticulousness went into the Party Political Manifesto for The Silly Party, which came as an insert. Riffs on adverts were also a staple. ‘There was an ad for the Whizzo Chocolate Assortment,’ says Hepburn, ‘which was a pretty close parody of Cadbury’s advertising, except that these particular chocolates were made of steel bolts that spring out when you bit into them.’ Fake ads were nothing new – Mad magazine had made them a trademark – but rarely had they been done with such relish. Birdsall chose the name Omnific, whose latest incarnation he founded with Lee in 1983, because the idea of a design studio bearing its founders’ names made him nervous. He had a chat with Herb Lubalin and decided that words starting with ‘O’ or ‘Q’ sounded nicest. Birdsall combed the dictionary, dallying over Quarto and Octavo before choosing Omnific: ‘It’s nice looking and it meanings all-creating.’ In 1977 Martens began to teach part time at the school of art at Arnhem. He is still there (two days a week), and this has helped to keep him and a family afloat, supplementing the poorly paid but otherwise rewarding work he does. His teaching has helped to consolidate what one might now speak of as a school of “Arnhem typography”. Before him, Jan Vermeulen, Kees Kelfkens and Alexander Verberne had helped to establish a serious interest in typography at the school. Now there are about 20 years’ worth of Arnhem students, a few from each class, who engage with typography as a serious, life-absorbing activity, concerned with making texts accessible without the interposition of a designer ego. The starting point is always: is this text worth publishing anyway? Talk to Verberne and you may see him ironically wiping the dirty café table with some pretentious piece of graphic design. Talk to Martens, and you will find him throwing things down – even work that bears his name – with the comment “another superfluous book”.

So what is this socially committed, critical typography? Without a connection to explicitly radial content, and with the eclipse of left politics through the 1980s, it isn’t obvious. In the last few years, “radical” has meant radical in form, or in fact radical in image. Architects and designers have borrowed the false prop of post-structuralist theory, in which the airy abstractions of language become everything – and material reality is displaced and denied. (Jean Baudrillard on the Gulf War was the clearest instance of this.) Text is unsettled and deconstructed, to become just image. And when this work is reproduced in magazines and annuals, its fate as mere image is sealed forever. The critical and subversive possibilities of this wild and “radical” output are then zeros. Pictured looking as pleased as Punch – and every bit the young Wally Olins – after getting my first job in design. Well, actually my first job published. Now sitting alongside me on my bookcase, a copy of ‘Coloured Paper Craft for Schools’, my prize for entering the Samuel Jones & Co. Gummed Paper Craft Competition 1962 at the impressionable age of 7. When Birdsall was designing the weekly covers for The Independent Magazine he became known for the catchphrase ‘How often do you get the chance to put Elvis on the cover?’ So when he was fired, his leaving card showed his distinctive profile with the coverline ‘How often do you get the chance to put Derek Birdsall on the cover?’ Birdsall is amused. He knows his worth, but above all has a sense of proportion about what he does. How to group text and images in ways that make sense? What size of type? How much space between the words, between the lines? What length of line? They represent the very idea of the graphic thinker, the figure who we can trace through Herbert Bayer to Milton Glaser to Alan Fletcher – the "artisan professional". That figure doesn't easily exist any more. The graphic artist has now become a branding consultant, and communication design has become determined by the findings of research and focus groups.It] need not be an arbitrary decision,’ he says. ‘The suitability of a typeface to the subject of the book is less important than to the nature of its text. Text that contains dates, dimensions, formulae or footnotes needs a face with good numerals, fractions and mathematical sorts. Here, a type with numerals smaller than the capitals, such as Bell and Joanna, works well.’ Birdsall is currently writing a book, with the working title of The Intelligent Book, which features a utilitarian typewriter face for the text, Schreibmaschinensch. In it, he describes how he selects a typeface. The redesign was so successful that Facetti adopted variations of it for other Penguin series. For Penguin Classics, he introduced the use of an historic painting, invariably reflecting the themes of the book, to the covers and for Penguin Modern Poets, he commissioned a series of photograms by Peter Barrett, Roger Mayne and Alan Spain between 1962 and 1965. One of Facetti’s final projects before leaving Penguin in 1972 was to commission Derek Birdsall to redesign its education titles.

He spent the best part of his service armed with nothing more than mapping pens, Indian ink and tracing paper, producing detailed drawings for three army depots and, in the process, learning an awful lot. A few designers have stood against the reduction to image. In Martens’ typography, we find the power and resonance of a deep commitment to material. His preference is for materials that are a bit rough, not too perfect; if they wear visibly through use, well, that is what happens in life. You will not find any heavy varnishing on his covers, unless, as with Oase 33, it is there as an ironic comment on that issue’s special them: the metropolis. Take the simplest case, of a single sheet of paper for a letterheading. Printing some of the text on the reverse side, so it shows through to the front, provides another means of coding information as well as demonstrating that the sheet is a three-dimensional thing in the world. Tim was an amazing employer I only worked for him for about 18 months, but in that time he let me go and teach at St Martin’s one day a week and do my own freelance work. I also learnt how to organise projects and deal with clients. It was a great studio full of very creative strong women and men of mixed ages so we all learned from each other.” The Penguin identity is synonymous with the goodwill to Penguin Books, which has been created over many years. Despite the change in typography and the introduction of new a element (pictorial), the new crime series will maintain a continuity of this goodwill, by means of identification between the current and the new styles. This identification is achieved by establishing a common denominator between the current and new series through integration of areas and type. This denominator is the strong horizontal movement, which is emphasised in the current crime cover (fig.1), and which is repeated in the new cover by the use of a white horizontal panel (fig.2). The white panel will help in the transition period, but after the new style is established this panel can be discarded. Even today, were you to ask people to picture a Penguin book, many would describe the cover as two horizontal coloured bands of orange, or green, and the title and author’s name printed in the white centre panel. In other words the typographic Penguin cover design of 1935: the work of Edward Young. And yet it is more than half a century since Penguin dropped that simple, powerful brand in favour of illustration and full colour covers.This echoes precisely the dilemma that Penguin found difficult to resolve for a considerable period. Jan Tschichold had first proposed a revised grid to accommodate illustration in the late 1940s. But it took a full twelve years for Penguin to embrace the inevitable and abandon the brand identity that instantly identified the imprint, and with it some of the implicit trust that had built up through war and peacetime.

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Birdsall was now able to support his growing family. He was also networking with other designers. It was with three of these, George Daulby, George Mayhew and Peter Wildbur that he formed BDMW Associates in 1960. Commander offered them accommodation in the attic of Balding and Mansall’s offices. Despite this astonishing attention to detail, Birdsall’s work is disarmingly simple. Like great screen actors, it is what is left out that makes the performance compelling. He is not a showy designer interested in trends. His passion lies in the details: the typeface, naturally and, with books, the feel of the paper; the quality of the binding; the cut of the font; the evenness of line endings; the perfect balance of image to space. Attention to detail became a matter of pride. ‘The closer the pastiche was to the real thing, the better the gag would work,’ says Hepburn. ‘We became interested in the tension between how something looked and what was being said.’ A good example was the Radio Times-style report on the ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year Race’. Idle remembers: ‘That was a case of slotting something into a context. On the TV show we’d used a documentary format; here, it was the Radio Times.’ Hepburn continues: ‘The typeface, layout and design were all as close as possible to the magazine, even down to the rather poorly produced photos.’