OUGD404 - Romek Marber

Romek Marber

born in Poland in 1925
moved to England in 1946 following World War 2

First commissioned by Germano Facetti - who'd been impressed by Marbers work in the Economist - to design covers for 'Our language' and 'language in the modern world'. After this he began to design covers for the Penguin crime series alongside Derek Birdsall and John Sewell, however only his design proposal was accepted. Ever since, his designs have been synonymous with Penguin Books.

The covers had remained unchanged since Edward Young first designed them 25 years before this. As well as this Young created the penguin logo and came up with the colour band system for genre of books. Orange and white for novels, green for crime and blue for educational books.

Marber wanted to make the book covers fresher and more up to date whilst still keeping characteristics from the old covers so he kept up the green theme for the crime novels but he altered the shade slightly.
As well as changing the shade he also introduced a grid system to give uniformity to the crime series. Marber is quoted as saying that before his designs, 'Penguin cover design was in a muddle drifting from one design to another, diluting Penguin Books’ identity, reputation and goodwill.'

The grid system used by Marber introduced continuity to the book covers, clearly showing the books belonged to the same publisher, let alone the same genre.

The grid allows for most of the page to be an illustration, often portraying the theme of the book.

The top third of the grid is allocated to type; the genre of book, title and author. The type is generally aligned to the right of the book, with longer titles either running in two lines or running over to the left side of the page. 

Marber believed his grid was so successful in part because of the rational element of control it gave book covers. He also attributed the success due to the visual impact of the illustrations covering more than half of the covers.