It’s funny how topics of conversation sometimes repeat themselves for no apparent reason. This week Romek Marber and his designs for Penguin have come up with sufficient frequency for me to take it as a sign I should post some links about about him:
Eye Magazine has a great article about his classic design of Penguin Crime Series:
Marber’s grid allows for different placements of title and author’s name depending on the length of the title and the needs of the design as a whole. There are small inconsistencies in some of the vertical measurements on a few of the books, probably due to printer’s error, but the basic design is sufficiently robust that it does not matter… With the typographic structure in place, Marber could concentrate on producing images that reflected the atmosphere of the books, which he read with relish from cover to cover. He was a graphic image-maker of great versatility, able to sum up the stories with motifs and ciphers that contrived to be both playful and threatening. Many of these whodunnits were decades old, but his interpretations gave them a contemporary allure.
The Ministry of Type shows you how to construct the famous Marber grid.
Apt Studio have a Marber WordPress theme (demo). Are any literary blogs using this I wonder?
And there’s this great Flickr set of Romek Marber Crime Covers.
Please let me know if you have any other good Marber links…
In other news…
The Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000 by David Malki (via INDEX // mb).
The Awesomeness Manifesto — I’m a little skeptical about these kinds of manifestos simply because they’re not terribly useful, but Umair Haque’s list is as interesting for its criticism about the chimera that is ‘innovation’ as for what is says about the warm and fuzzy ‘awesomeness’.
[…] was talking about Romek Marber right before I left the building, so it seems appropriate to get things started with him […]