The Marber Grid
In the 1940s Tschichold helped design more than 500 of the famous Penguin paperback books, these were purely typographic yet are still iconic. When Marber arrived on the scene there was little work with imagery for the book designs and there had been little change since Tschichold for 20 years.
By arranging the design so typographic information and the colophon (a publisher's emblem) within the top third of the page, he allowed for over two thirds of the cover to be used for illustration “effectively giving the cover artwork the space needed to capture a browser’s attention and sell the book.”
He developed a grid so that each design could follow a similar pattern and order. Each line is either evenly spaced between two lines or cuts through two intersecting lines.
Application of Marber Grid
Although the Marber Grid is something that is distinctive of Penguin Books, perhaps I could develop a new grid which I use for 'Laptop Cat Books', which is what the Shadowland stories will be published under. This will give them consistency and make the designs distinctive and bold. This grid format will also lend itself nicely to the classic approach I hope to achieve. Looking at these, maybe the lines could be placed underneath the design, or even to the right of it.
Below I have sketched eight variations of grids that could be applied to the Shadowland covers. These will need to be explored further digitally, but I am keen to implement a new take on the grid design. I am particularly interested in having the title section in the centre of the page, or sectioning off the image into a box - as seen in the bottom left image of the page.
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