The Making of Penguin Great Loves

This is the interesting story behind the simple covers of Penguin's Great Loves editions.

David Pearson, Penguin Press Designer explains his design methods for creating the covers of the Great Loves series:

'As with the previous Great Ideas, this series makes use of a seriously-reduced palette to ensure a recognisable, coherent look across all 20 titles.

Design for books on this subject can often appear cliché-ridden and hackneyed so we decided on a more abstract, symbolic approach, using botany as the chief source of inspiration.

I wanted the images to be as evocative as possible so I considered more traditional printing methods such as screen printing or lino cutting. However, the time and budget constraints were such that this wasn’t a realistic option so I began to look for ways to create similar effects at a reduced cost.

The most successful experiment by far consisted of the generation of flat artwork (Pic 01)...

...which could then be made into rubber stamps (Pic 02).

Stamping the images added layers of texture, creating a much more tactile appearance and one more befitting this subject (Pics 03 and 04).

Once the artwork had been stamped, it went back into a layout programme (Pic 05)...

Click on the link to view Pic 05 pdf.

...so that it could be easily assembled into a print-ready graphic (Pic 06).

As with any series, the main challenge was keeping the ideas looking fresh across a range of titles (and not slipping too far into chocolate-box territory). I think I have Sigmund Freud to thank for this!'