Hasta La Ideas

Penguin has collaborated with AIDS awareness fund (RED) and a team of designers to produce new covers for eight Penguin Classics. Each cover replaces the usual black band with red, employing a quote from the text of the book as the visual hit (covers by Coralie Bickford-Smith shown left and Non-Format, right)…

While a repackaging isn’t something the Classics series is necessarily crying out for, we particularly like the way that this small run of eight titles has been handled – with the typographic designs occasionally encroaching over the (RED)-inspired band and the link with the organisation brought out in the bracketing of the Penguin Classics identity. Jim Stoddart, art director of Penguin Press plans to use a different typographer for each cover commission and more are planned in the near future.

Three of the eight covers featured here were developed in-house at Penguin Press, with the other covers created by FUEL, Nathan Burton, Studio Frith, Grey318, and Non-Format (whose brilliant take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in case you have trouble making out the odd word, reads “His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell fire blazed behind them.” Powerful stuff.

Anna Karenina designed by FUEL

The House of Mirth designed by Nathan Burton

Therese Raquin designed by Jim Stoddart (Penguin Press art director)

Great Expectations designed by Stefanie Posavec (Penguin Press art department)

The Turn of the Screw designed by Studio Frith

Notes From Underground designed by Gray318 (Jon Gray)

Dracula designed by Non-Format

The Secret Agent designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Penguin Press art department)