OUGD404 - Studio Brief 02 - The Marber Grid

Romek Marber, in producing his proposals for the new designs for Penguin crimes, observed that this series had remained unchanged for almost 25 years since Edward Young's designs, which were mainly typographic. In the process, Marber developed his own grid system so that each design for the series could follow a similar layout and pattern.

The grid keeps the same horizontal branding used previously in Edward Young's designs, however, the cover image occupies over two-thirds of the available space, which he used as a strategy to capture attention and sell the book. All typographic information was then collated and divided into three bands within the top third of the page. These contained the colophon (a brief statement containing information about the publication of a book), series names and price, the title and author's name.

Inspired by Marber's designs, Germano Facetti adopted this specific arrangement throughout the 1960's and 70's for practically all Penguin book series, whilst others contained small white figures to give books by the same author a distinctive and individual identification.