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Great Journeys Series
Authors Various
Design Directors David Pearson and Jim Stoddart
Designer: David Pearson
Publisher: Penguin Books UK
Typefaces: Adobe Caslon
Illustrators: Pippa (2), Victoria Sawdon (18), and Jeff Edwards (interior maps)
Picture Researcher: Samantha Johnson
I have always admired and been inspired by this series from afar, so I figured it was a good time to get a closer look. Read below to see Pearson and Sawdon's comments on the project. Great insight into the process from both the designer and illustrator. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this article!
-Jason Gabbert
Promotional copy:
The greatest journeys ever written
Great Journeys are 20 real-life adventure stories that take the reader around the world and back, crossing cultures and continents to tell some of the greatest travel stories ever written.
They offer a chance to rediscover a time when many cultures seemed strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.
Comments by Pearson:
Galvanised by the commercial success of the Great Ideas series, Penguin Editor Simon Winder decided on another selection of pamphletty paperbacks with the aim of channeling interest back into the larger, complete works available in the Penguin Classics range. As before, I was pretty much left alone to manage the project by a very trusting, supportive (and busy) Art Director, Jim Stoddart.
9–11 I’ve been a long-time admirer of Hans Schmoller’s vertical grid design as a means of combining promotional copy and imagery whilst retaining a sense of the familiar Penguin tripartite design [9–11]. I imagined the same logic could be applied to this series, with the vertical stress of the layout representing a curtain or passageway that the reader peers/passes through.
12–15 Around this time I was plundering ephemera fairs, picking up lots of travel-related items such as hotel luggage labels and brochures [12–15] and since I would be working with a pretty tight budget, the inventive use of overprinting appealed to me, giving the impression of a broader colour palette. I also loved the highly stylized and reductive visual language being used.
16–18 Working closely with picture researcher Samantha Johnson we amassed a broad range of images that – along with the odd doodle – would help form the brief for our illustrators (Pipa and Victoria Sawdon)
In an attempt to highlight the geographical breadth of the series internal maps were commissioned [19–21]. These were printed on the inside front- and back-covers and use the same title-specific colour-coding as the exteriors [22]. This theme also carries over to the spines, with the overprinting of each book’s signature colour to create a subtle colour distinction between titles [23].
The series typeface (Adobe Caslon) was chosen for it’s neutral appearance, allowing for free play elsewhere. I was aware that such a broad range of subjects would need to be anchored by quite a fixed grid and restrained typography was very much a part of that. However, once the illustrations started rolling in it became apparent that an imbalance existed between type and image with the former appearing rather lightweight in comparison. The subsequent beefing-up of the letters was achieved through the process of foil-blocking, which expanded the letterforms slightly (the crudeness of which seemed to mirror the rough-and-ready nature of travel logs and weather-worn journals) [24].
If I were to be critical of the design I’d have to say that I overlooked just how much variation would be required to maintain intrigue over a set of 20 books. This was more easily achieved with Great Ideas as the front cover layout was completely re-invented from cover-to-cover. In hindsight I feel that the rigorous nature of the grid perhaps worked against us on this front. That said, I think that the illustrators performed admirably with what was an incredibly constrained brief!
On the 'Pitch' images I used the 'dancing' penguin I redrew in 2007 [17]. This is partly because I thought it looked like it was on the move, but more because of vanity, as it had been a long-time ambition of mine to redraw it. The cover meeting thought it a step too far and so I had to wait until the Great Loves series to unleash it.
Comments by Sawdon:
When I first heard of Great Journeys I was both incredibly excited at the possibility of working on the series, and incredibly fearful, as I never believed it would actually happen. The day David sent an email asking for my help I was ecstatic. The initial cover was for Adventures in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird, which was a great starting point as, of all the places covered by the series, this was the one that had most significance to me as my brother lives just down the road from this beautiful part of the world. Following that came much more rich imagery with wonderfully varied subject matter and I was eventually lucky enough to work on 18 of the 20 covers.
The grid was more challenging than it hopefully looks. I was very wary of the illustration being sympathetic to the type and filling the space in such a way that the cover felt balanced, and didn’t look like 3 vertical stripes. The mirror image could fool you in to thinking it was half the work, but often, what would seem perfect on one half of the page would then look ridiculous when flipped into the other so they would need re-working in tandem. I didn’t spend hours on roughs but tended to have an idea of where to start from embarrassingly bad sketches in notebooks [26]. I would then build the illustration up on the page, constantly flipping and adjusting until it felt right.
When I first saw the whole series as printed books, what struck me was the colour, which I think is one of the nicest things about them when you see them as a set. I love seeing the hint of this on the spines and the unexpected flash of it from the maps when you open them up.
I enjoyed every minute of this job and would happily do another 20 tomorrow. This may not happen but I did manage to sneak in a very limited edition number 21 for David’s birthday last year! [27].
1.19.09 // Michael Kellner said:
Splendid work. All of the sound reasoning behind your conceptual approach and practical execution has paid-off in ways both explicit and implicit. Evident and suggested.
Speaking of the "rigorous nature of the grid," I think you succeeded admirably in both adhering to it, and--in the best sense--playing off of it. Your subtle attention to the spines is what's called, I believe, going the extra mile. Rather nicely appropriate for a travel series!
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1.20.09 // Ian Brian Shimkoviak said:
and another one of my favorite designers. Pearson's work is flawless. Always seems very well planned and executed with not much left to chance. But I am sure there is a bit of that there too.
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2.11.09 // Jenny Grigg said:
Seeing David Pearson's designs for Penguin in recent years has given me (and probably many of us)a huge boost as a book designer. Also, congratulations to the art director and publishers inhouse at Penguin UK. Fine art qualities in commercial publishing is no longer, necessarily, a dream! I have admired them many times in many bookstores here in Australia and in Europe. I always pick at least one of them up, turn it over, and put it back, carefully.
