Faber and Faber's creative director on designing Modern Classics

Date
17 April 2015

A couple of months ago, we spoke to a number of book designers about whether they felt you had to read a book to design its cover. Whichever camp you sit in, it’s clear that with something as powerful and evocative as a piece of literature, summing up complex and emotive ideas in a single cover is no mean feat, so we were keen to hear more about how the process worked when designing for Faber’s new series of modern classics. The series launches this week with ten books including Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot’s Selected Poems and Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. A further six titles are to be released in June.

And while Faber and Faber’s creative director Donna Payne hasn’t worked her way through all of them, the simple, considered covers are brave, direct and sometimes deliciously cryptic. “We wanted to use surprising images,” says Donna. “The design team hasn’t read all of them but the editors had given us a strong description, so we could focus on the period of time, or the ‘colour’ of the book, or its general tone.” Once the template was designed and the direction set for imagery, studio manager Patrick Fox took the lead in researching images on a title by title basis.

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Donna Payne: Faber Modern Classics

Each book uses a bright band in one of the Faber colours (“aged brights”) on a pale grey backdrop, with a single image and quote to summarise the book’s content. All text is in Faber’s brand font, Swiss 721 in different cuts and weights. “We used a flexible design that was clean and Modernist, so it could embrace a wide range of texts and a diverse lists of authors,” Donna explains. “We used the colour band wrapped all the way round so that the books are as strong on the shelf as on the table.”

The imagery for each text is selected from archive art, design, photography and ephemera, with the Look Back in Anger cover showing an original poster from one of the play’s first runs at the Royal Court Theatre. “There’s huge flexibility with the covers to use not just photography but paintings or illustrations,” says Donna. “It was a very freeform process in the end, more a stream-of-consciousness.”

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Donna Payne: Faber Modern Classics

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Donna Payne: Faber Modern Classics

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Donna Payne: Faber Modern Classics

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Donna Payne: Faber Modern Classics

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Donna Payne: Faber Modern Classics

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Donna Payne: Faber Modern Classics

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Donna Payne: Faber Modern Classics

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Emily Gosling

Emily joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in the summer of 2014 after four years at Design Week. She is particularly interested in graphic design, branding and music. After working It's Nice That as both Online Editor and Deputy Editor, Emily left the company in 2016.

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