ROMEK MARBER

 This month my design podcast The Poster Boys will pore over the history of Penguin book cover design. Every day this month on my Tumblr, I'll be posting a cover I love by one of the many great designers and art directors that contributed to the company's aesthetic history--- please follow along. 

Polish artist Romek Marber, after fleeing a Bochnia ghetto as a teenager, made his way to Britain, earned an education scholarship, then studied art at St. Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art before beginning his professional career designing covers of The Economist, among other editorial work.

Around 1961, after designing a few covers for Penguin Books, Marber pitched to the company's new art director Germano Facetti a winning re-brand for Penguin Books' Crime series (I am quite curious to see the other two designers' submissions). Based on the now-famous Marber Grid, these designs retained Penguin's signature brand reliability while moving a new modern aesthetic direction; Penguin's traditional Gil Sans type moved out of the way for a sans-serif Groestk face (note quite Helvetica, which came later) which, in the Crime series, was allowed to not even follow strict capitalization rules. With the branding, title, and author all situated handsomely atop the board, Marber left the remaining negative space for bold, abstract, psychological visual interpretations of the moody stories within.

Marber designed over 70 of these covers himself, and called up top British designers David Birdsall, John Sewell, Alan Fletcher, George Mayhew, Ursula Noerbel, and a dozen others to cover additional titles, none of which I've shown here as they deserve their own posts.

 

 

In a great example of Penguin's ongoing effort to brand certain authors within their overall brand, Marber hid a white cutout body on each Dorothy L. Sayers cover-- I love this.

 

 

I imagine that Penguin-- and their fans-- loved these covers as much then as we do today. No surprise, then, that Facetti wanted to try out Marber's solution in other series outside of Crime. In Fiction, where orange was Penguin's famous identifying color, Marber tried some illustrated Simenon covers, and after that it was a go. As it turned out, a two-color design looked just as great in blue or orange as it did in green.

 

 

 

The Marber grid stuck, first more strictly in the Pelican and Fiction series, and then only in spirit; When the formal lines of Marber's grid needed to have some flexibility, they moved, and when the Marber grid eventually went away, the Marber style and influence remained stronger than ever in Penguin's cover type and composition.

Marber's work under Facetti remains iconic as ever. Other folks have written about this period more eloquently than I have, and I encourage fans to check out Penguin by Design, and The Penguin Collector's Society's Penguin by Designers which transcribes one of Marber's recent talks (he was hired to create a new cover for Penguin's 70th birthday celebration). You'll find more designs in Postcards from Penguin, and with any luck we'll see more gallery shows devoted to Marber's great work.

P.S. You know how great a designer is when you see how many imitations crop up years later. I'm only issuing one coupon for Marber imitators, and it goes to the same guy who got my only coupon for Saul Bass (Anatomy of a Burger anyone?).... Olly Moss. It doesn't hurt that he made waves for this early on, seeming to have been the first to riff on Marber with a clever mash-up-- here of some classic video games. I remember being filled with ecstatic jealousy when I first saw these. But remember, he gets my only coupon!

 

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Process: SOMETHING WILD

Last fall, I found myself in the strange but fortunate situation of working on two DVD packages for Criterion simultaneously. One of these, Andrei Tarkovsky's SOLARIS, allowed for a long, free-formed process of experimenting and exploration, while the other, Jonathan Demme's SOMETHING WILD, came with a more specific brief. But it ended up being a perfect example of how a simple concept can sometimes be the toughest to execute.

original Something Wild posters

After re-watching the movie, which my good friend Jason introduced me to when we were college roommates, I couldn't resist coming right out of the gate with this Melanie Griffith cover with amped-up 80's pastels:

I was quickly informed that due to contractual obligations, if we were to feature one of the two leads on the cover, we'd have to feature the other (in this case, the great Jeff Daniels) in equal measure. And as much as I was enamored with Griffith's Lulu (as any fan of this movie would be), I knew that this cover should probably try to get under the surface a little more. My art director Sarah challenged me to the assignment of coming up with something featuring an icon or object from the film, avoiding its lead characters completely. We immediately thought of handcuffs, a symbolically-charged prop from two of the movie's most memorable and disparate scenes. I mocked up a cut-out pair of cuffs and, caution to the wind, threw in a heart locked up inside. Cheesiness be damned, the heart could be a perfect and playful indicator that this was a romance and not a cop movie, plus it seemed to work pretty well thematically for a movie whose characters are emotionally locked and chained to one another. Sounds easy enough, but without even realizing it, I soon found myself stuck on autopilot in an 80's Lulu-landscape of color.

These may have been good covers back when the film was originally released, or covers that Lulu herself would have liked. But I needed steering back into the 21st century to re-brand the movie in some way and stay as far away from the visual palettes and cliches of the 80's as possible. It was a case of not seeing the forest for the trees... the very 80's trees. So, keeping the handcuffs and scrapping the rest of the mess I'd made, I started from scratch and asked myself what would be the simplest, most stripped-down graphic I could get away with, looking to Romek Marber's iconic Penguin Crime book covers for inspiration. Presenting Something Wild as romantic-comedy-meets-film-noir was our new goal, and I wanted to convey that dark side, the unique tone shifts that Demme brings into the movie and balances so well. So, starting with stark black and keeping the aquas, pinks and blues as accent colors, I kept it simple and the results felt much better...

I swapped around the colors and tweaked the title treatment to add a little bit of fun back in, and we had our final cover. It was great to be able to go with such a minimalist concept and hopefully it captures the tone and spirit of the movie at the same time. I have new respect for the great poster artists who excel at creating iconic images using no people, stars, characters whatsoever... it's hard! The final cover:

Of course, after deciding to re-style the cover, I had to do the same with my plans for the rest of the package. Seen here are a couple of menus before and after we scrapped the 80's vibe.

Lastly, here's the Blu-ray disc art, an illustration which also appears on the back of the standard DVD case. I thought it would be neat to illustrate other things and moments from the movie throughout the package in the same style as the cover, but ultimately ended up with just this, leaving plenty of room in the menus and booklet for some great photos and stills.

A fun challenge for a really fun movie that I'm so happy to have worked on, made by a director I have a tremendous amount of respect and love for. Something Wild is out on DVD and Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection on May 12th.

TOP 10 OF 2010: #3

This movie already had a great poster, and while I found myself thinking of lots of great conceptual ideas for the story told in this movie, I couldn't figure out how to execute them. Meanwhile I'm looking at all of these Blue Note album covers and old Penguin covers that say so much with just an arrangement of shapes, and I wanted to try to see how far I could get with this film's themes: Design, communication, position, weight, strategy, connection, closeness, isolation, loneliness.

DESIGN BOOKSHELF

I consider myself far more talented at collecting neat art books than I am at actually producing art... Thus I give you these photos of my new Ikea bookshelves stocked with all of my favorite sources of inspiration I've collected through the years. I recommend them all, and will be posting more selected images from some of these books soon.

THE SOVIET ARTS POSTER

I recently was lucky enough to find a copy of this oversized book released by Penguin in 1990: The Soviet Arts Poster: Theatre, Cinema, Ballet, Circus, 1917-1987. It should go without saying that I think Soviet poster art to be one of the greatest things ever, and this book covers so many artists, styles, movements, and subjects within the arts, with large reproductions of the posters to study in detail. A goldmine. I'm going to have to do a second installment of pictures from this book at some point soon; there are just too many great ones I want to share. And I'm looking forward to learning more about so many of these wonderful artists.

I apologize for the poor quality of some of these pictures. This book is way too large to scan with my current scanner, my digital camera is doing some kind of optical distortion which causes the straight edges to curve (any tips on getting rid of this? It drives me crazy!), and some of the photos came out blurry. So many people out there are more talented at photographing and scanning book pages than I am... until I get a better setup, these will have to do as teasers... Hopefully anyone interested might find a copy of this great book floating around out there. Here are a few of my favorites; head over to my Flickr page to see the rest.

The Stenberg Brothers, The Arsenal, 1929




A. Gan, First Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture, 1927




Mark Levin, The Circus, 1968




Anatoly Yakushim, The First All-Russian Prints Exhibition, USSR Artists Union, 1974




Igor Maistrovsky, 'Polygamist: Operation', 1978




Gunars Zemgals, The Time of the Land-surveyors, 1980




Alfred Saldre, Spring Exhibition of Tallinn Artists, 1974




V. Jarmut and E. Karmas, Illmar Torn: Drawings, Pastels: Exhibition, 1984

OLLY MOSS AND THE MINIMALIST MOVIE POSTER

A few words about the "minimalist" movie poster movement that's been spreading like a virus around the web for the past 2 years. In late 2008, the young artist from the UK named Olly Moss gained rapid-fire recognition for executing a simple but brilliant postmodern design concept: taking the legendary Marber grid-- the graphic template for book covers released by Penguin in the 60's and 70's-- and fashioning "new" imaginary covers for classic video games.

Olly quickly went on to prove that he had more to offer the design world than a great eye for the perfect mash-up, posting a series of self-initiated movie posters composed in black, white and red.


Around this time I decided that Olly was my hero, combining his love for (and skill with) clean, effective, retro-inspired design with iconic subjects of popular culture. It was just what I wanted to do, but he was doing it first, and better (and younger). Olly has now become a household name in the design community, and has gone on to design apparel, editorial illustrations, and posters galore, from his recent movie poster designs for Empire Magazine (in a monthly entry titled "Ollywood") to his highly sought-after prints designed for the final season of LOST.


Having just moved from the UK to LA, rumor has it Olly is now doing movie title sequences for the movie industry with which he shares his nickname. Cheers, Olly. You've been a huge inspiration to me, and to so many other young designers. I'm a big fan, and I can't wait to see where your career takes you next.

Of course, such a widespread influence inevitably leads to widespread imitation, and while its too early to pinpoint exactly how it all happened so fast, since Olly's breakthrough success there has been an outpouring of "minimalist movie poster" designs hitting the web. Here are some of them.

M.S. Corley serendipitously redesigned the Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, and Spiderwick book series as Marber Penguins...



Meanwhile Spacesick rolled out an awesome and authentic series of "I Can Read Movies" book covers...



...and then before you knew it, minimalist movie posters started popping up everywhere. Ibraheem Youssef's Quentin Tarantino movie posters:


Mehmet Gozetlik's movie posters advertising brands and products as leads:

Brandon Schaefer's minimalist Blu-ray covers:



Matt Needle's minimalist Hitchcock posters:



Nick Tassone's minimalist Stephen King posters:



A massive series of TV show posters by Albert Exergian:



Followed by Exergian's Tim Burton movie posters:



Ty Mattson's minimalist Lost posters, acquired officially by ABC:
"Film the Blanks" movie poster guessing games:



Minimalist movie posters by Jamie Bolton:



Very minimal movie posters by Gary Clarke (Graphic Nothing):



Very very minimal movie posters by Eduardo Prox:


More from Hexagonall...


Robert Cook...


Gidi Vigo...



Alex Eylar...




Marcin Zeglinski...


Premedito...



and Madfishes:



Believe it or not, the list goes on. These designs fill pages upon pages of your basic "minimalist movie poster" Google search, and most of the artists offer their designs for sale in print. Now let me be clear: I do not mean to disparage the efforts of any of these artists. Some of the designs above I really love. But I am interested in observing how this "movement" has e-(de?)volved. It seems that as more of these posters crop up, the range of creativity involved in their execution has become more narrow; to the point where drawing a shape and typing a movie title has become accepted as "design." Perhaps it is, and there's nothing new under the sun. I'm not interested in pointing fingers, and I'm definitely as guilty of this as anyone, having a few MMP's in my portfolio myself. I'm simply interested in looking at this recent trend as a whole. You can judge for yourself which of these designs stand out above the rest, and which designs leave something to be desired to you. If one thing's clear, it's that in the continually-evolving era of the internet, anyone in their bedroom can become a superstar, artists and designers included. But if I'm being honest, the oversaturation of this trend causes me some concern. Scroll back up to Olly Moss' poster for Indiana Jones, and you'll see not just an image, but a concept. I hope that all designers, amateur or professional, would continue to challenge themselves towards a greater synthesis of concept, image, and thus: meaning. So to all the minimalist poster designers out there, I congratulate you on your successes. You have been inspired, and you have inspired others, and your enthusiasm is contagious. Your contributions have helped to make alternate movie posters a continuing force to be reckoned with. As we move forward with the well quickly drying, seize this opportunity to move beyond the "minimal" and take it to the next level. Let's see what else ya got.


(credit for the first image in this post, "Minimalist Movie Poster," goes to the always clever Brandon Schaefer.)