Cover Stories: Former Penguin designer David Pearson talks us through his favourite covers

David Pearson never gets to choose what he reads. As one of the most exciting book jacket designers working today, his literary tastes tend to take a back seat to whatever he is working on at the time. Not that his starting point is always immersing himself in the text; he gleefully admits that he doesn’t always have the whole book to read when he starts work – “I’ve done book design where I didn’t even have the title!” For a creative at the very top of his game, David is both genuinely humble and refreshingly enthusiastic – you can hear the sheer passion for design in every sentence. Watch one of his talks online – they’re punctuated by giggles and ego-less asides – but fundamentally he takes the whole business of book jacket design very seriously. It helps that he got to learn in-house at Penguin, originally in the text design department but later on the publisher’s covers. Although he left to set up his own studio Type As Image in 2007, David is still very much associated with his work at Penguin, but it’s a case of what might have been for one of the publisher’s competitors. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: “A rare moment of clarity and design sure-footedness. I did two versions and quickly decided on the second. By this point in the series (number 56 of 100), one or two covers had a canny knack of falling together, largely because of the limitations in place (two colours, type-only, plus debossing). I’d like to make it clear that this isn’t always the case; I did 47 different covers before gaining an approval recently.” Penguin by Design: “A true labour of love this one. Because of it’s non-standard nature, this was taken on as a freelance job, and so worked around my day job designing covers at Penguin.At one point, I was escorted off the premises as it was deemed that I hadn’t left my desk in three days (and posed something of a health and safely risk).” “While at college I was lucky enough to be offered a work placement by my tutor Phil Baines, to design a large-scale art monograph (for Lawrence Alma-Tadema) for Phaidon Press,” David says. “Phil walked me through every stage of the book’s production, from styling the edited manuscript through to the final lay-outs. I even got to run my designs past Alan Fletcher who at the time was responsible for overseeing Phaidon’s visual output. It was an absurdly privileged position for a student to be in. There was a slow and methodical nature to the work which seemed to suit my temperament, and I knew from-then-on that my future lay in book design.” At Central Saint Martins he gorged on the college’s typography collection (the Central Lettering Archive) and joined Penguin soon after graduating. He was walking into a company who had employed some of the 20th Century’s foremost graphic designers down the decades; the likes of Jan Tschichold, Hans Schmoller, Gerald Cinamon and Derek Birdsall. Surely this was a daunting step for a kid straight out of art school? “It was the pedigree that drew me to the place but in reality, knowledge of, and pride in the company’s design heritage was not widespread; at least not in-house. This is what created the opportunity for Penguin by Design, a chance to shine a light on these achievements and place design back at the centre of the company. It was also – for somewhat selfish reasons – an opportunity for me to gain access to Penguin’s archives and learn from some of my heroes.” In fact David became so obsessed with this graphic treasure trove that he had to be forcibly removed from the Penguin premises at one stage on health and safety grounds. He’s retained this intimate knowledge of some of the different eras of the company’s design history and can regale you with some of the stranger episodes; the decision to go pictorial in 1961 (which for some more conservative readers was the literary design equivalent of Dylan going electric); the bizarre couple of years later that decade when the company dispensed with an art director all together and the jackets were designed by the marketing department (producing what David calls “the panic covers”); the time when designers were first permitted to use circles on the covers and they start to crop up all over the place, regardless of genre or design sensibility. It’s simplistic to say that Penguin by Design – published in 2005 – made him a star but it cemented his reputation within the company and so increased the amount of trust placed in him. He was assigned to The Great Ideas series, in which Penguin re-issued books by the likes of Virginia Woolf, Machiavelli and Charles Darwin, some of which David designed himself, some of which he art directed. There are now five series of the Great Ideas titles and a whole host of spin-offs. It solidified the way David thinks about his process and opened him up to experimenting with new ideas. “I’m a rather uptight and precious designer, and very often find myself working energy out of my designs by over-thinking and over-f