Assignment Five: Your Choice Part One

Assignment Five: Your Choice, Part One – Idea Development

Brief 1: Book Design

Penguin Books have asked you to design anew house style for a collection of books on design for children and young people. They are starting with three titles: Colour, Typography and Photographs. Produce three covers – front, back and spine. The designs need to be recognisable as a series and at the same time be appreciated for their individual merits. The book dimensions are 190mm wide by 225mm high.

In addition they have asked you to produce the one on Typography, called A is for…Create an introductory chapter of at least four pages.

I started by defining the brief a little further. Children and Young People is a very broad market and it is unlikely a design for five years olds will work for fifteen year olds. I decided the market would be primarily Young Adult (defined as 12 – 18yrs; Young Adult Library Services).

I had already done some background research on Penguin Books, and having read ‘Penguin by Design,’(Baines & Pearson, 2005) I felt like I had plenty of scope for developing the designs. While they needed a degree of consistency, the cover designs could draw on a range of influences. Although Penguin is mostly associated with orange spines, it has used patterns and other colours so this didn’t feel too restrictive.

I then did my usual in terms of sketching ideas and thinking about the themes I might use to develop the designs.

: Sketch 1

: Sketch 2

: Sketch 2

: Sketch 3

: Sketch 4

: Sketch 5

I was a bit put off by the fact that the Typography book seemed to have a double title – both ‘Typography’ and ‘A is for…’ so in my sketches I played with some examples where they all had a title. But this also seemed inconsistent, why would you have a book on colour called ‘C is for…’ when the one on typography is ‘A is for…’? I was also a bit worried that the title might locate it in a much younger age group and could therefore be in tension with the age group I had chosen to work with. It seemed to me that this meant the cover needed to be eye catching enough to be taken off the shelf and explored.

During Section Four I found three books on typography that were both helpful and enjoyable:

Typography Workbook (Samara, 2004)
Playing with Type (McCormick, 2013)
How to Draw Type and Influence People (Hyndman, 2017)

The two activity books were particularly good for engaging me and were a bit more playful than some of the other resources I had found, which seemed to get very technical very quickly and I found a bit daunting as a non-specialist. I decided I would take a similar approach to encourage young readers to play with typography. I did a bit more research and found that Penguin do produce activity books so it would be in keeping with the brief.

I did more research around typography books for young people and found very little, apart from the truly delightful ‘Serif Fairy’ (Siegfried & Mann, 2007) I broadened the research to graphic design and found a few more titles, but not many – definitely a gap in the market!

: Cover Image

: Example page

: Example spread

Layout examples:

Typography Workbook – 230mm x 230mm, 3 column grid
Penguin by Design – 185mm x 220mm, 3-column grid
Playing with Type – 235mm x 235 mm, mainly 2 column grid
How to Draw Type… – 270mm x 230mm, layout is varied – single column to three
Graphic Design for Kids – 210mm x 230mm, two column grid

This seemed to imply that the dimensions I was working with were narrower than the other activity books I had seen. A challenge, but hopefully not insurmountable!