John Hamilton – Art Director, Penguin General
John attended the Glasgow School of Art and Design and specialized in illustration. He then became a junior book designer, and has continued on this path ever since.
John came to Penguin in 1997 as Penguin Art Director and was the driving force behind dropping the orange spines from the majority of Penguin fiction. He was also responsible, along with Jim Stoddart, for Penguin’s Seventieth Birthday Campaign, inviting seventy designers, artists and illustrators to create one cover each, designed within seven days for a flat fee of £70.
John is responsible for art-directing Penguin’s hardback imprints, Viking, Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, Fig Tree and Penguin Ireland.
Joanna Prior – Managing Director, Penguin General Books
Joanna has had a guiding hand on Penguin’s design for many years. In her role as Marketing and Publicity Director of Penguin UK (until July 2009) she helped to position Penguin’s books for the marketplace through their cover design and through some innovative and award-winning marketing campaigns. For the past sixteen years she has also run Penguin’s art committee, which is responsible for the comprehensive collection of text-based art that adorns the meeting rooms and corridors of Penguin’s offices at 80 Strand. In her current role as Managing Director of Penguin General Books she is responsible for publishing the prize winners and bestsellers, including Nick Hornby, Zadie Smith, Antony Beevor, John le Carré and Colm Tóibín.
Jim Stoddart – Art Director, Penguin Press
After graduating in Sheffield, Jim took a placement at Bill Smith Studio in London, which turned into a job designing record and CD covers for such labels as EMI, Virgin, BMG, Mute and Trojan Records. Five years later he joined Penguin, where he worked as a cover designer for eighteen months, and then he went to work with Chris Ashworth under Lewis Blackwell at Getty Images for twelve months. In 2001 he returned to Penguin as Art Director of Penguin Press, where he has overseen the redesign and rebranding of Penguin Classics, Penguin Modern Classics and Pelican Books, as well as designing and art-directing covers for Penguin’s Allen Lane hardback imprint, the Particular Books imprint and Penguin non-fiction paperbacks.
What the judges are looking for
We are looking for a striking cover design that is well executed, has an imaginative concept and clearly places the book for its market. While all elements of the jacket need to work together as a cohesive whole, remember that the front cover must be effective on its own and be eye-catching within a crowded bookshop setting. It also needs to be able to work onscreen for digital retailers such as Amazon.
The winning design will need to:
- have an imaginative concept and original interpretation of the brief
- be competently executed with strong use of typography
- appeal to a contemporary readership
- show a good understanding of the marketplace
- have a point of difference from the many other book covers it is competing against
Copyright must be cleared for all images used in your cover design and you must include a credit line on the back cover of your design for any third party images used. For example: ‘Cover photograph by Joe Bloggs’.
The penguin blog:
The penguin blog:
6 things to think about when designing a book cover
Our cover designers Rosie Palmer and Lauren Walker share 6 essential things to think about when designing a book cover.
17/01/2017
1. Think about the target market and who you want to pick up the book as the cover needs to appeal to them.
2. What do you want to tell the buyer about the book. What kind of genre is it? What do the other books in that genre look like that it will compete with?
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