Hasta La Ideas

Initial sketches by Richard Green for the new-look Pelican logo (on left). He explains that the bird’s ‘eye’ was a challenge to get right (original Pelican logos shown top left in both grids; Green’s final logos show bottom right in each)

For our latest edition of Monograph, free with subscriber copies of CR, we talked to Penguin Press’ art department about the rebirth of the Pelican imprint which relaunched this month. It was a chance to discuss design decisions, logo sketches and early cover treatments – and also look to where the brand is going next…

Pelican was relaunched this month after three decades in hibernation – and while one might think that the rich heritage of the imprint might weigh heavily on the shoulders of the design team (the brand originally ran from 1937 to 1984), it was in fact the digital era that influenced its new direction as much as anything.

Our new 18-page Monograph – which is available with new subscriptions starting with the June issue – features early Pelican designs by Edward Young, William Grimmond and Jan Tschichold, but focuses on the work that the current design team, led by art director Jim Stoddart, has been doing since last year.

Pages from Hans Schmoller’s notebooks showing the first Pelican logos from the 1930s and 40s

Launching in the late 1930s with Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, & Fascism, the non-fiction series was to continue the Penguin ethos of printing quality books at an affordable price. Pelican was about self-improvement – making knowledge accessible to a wider readership.

Indeed, Pelican’s were to be “the true everyman’s library for the twentieth century,” said Penguin founder Allen Lane. Now, Penguin’s art department has resurrected the imprint for the twenty-first.

Pelican covers from the 1940s and 50s

Pelican covers from the 1960s and 70s

Cover experiments by the current Penguin Press art department

Grid and logos for the new-look Pelican books

With a new logo by Penguin’s Richard Green and cover, text and digital design by Matthew Young, the project has put the talents of this tight-knit team to great use.

When the brief was announce last year, Young initially worked on a responsive website for Pelican – and from his experiments with typefaces there, chose Brandon and Freight as display and text fonts, respectively.

The first five editions in Pelican’s 2014 range

The full story of the rebirth of Pelican is in this month’s Monograph – available only with a subscription to Creative Review (it comes with our June issue, a World Cup special). Go to our Shopify page to start your subscription today.

Samplers from the first five Pelican books are now available from pelicanbooks.com – the books are in shops now (£7.99). The full website launches on June 1.