Style combination · Contrasts
Hauntology × Penguin Paperback Design
Ghost Box quotes the ruled Penguin band over a saturated field as an eerie, ironic memory; use the original when the template should simply sort and sell books, and Ghost Box when it should haunt.
Mix them and make something Hauntology Penguin Paperback Design
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)
- Type from Hauntology
- Colour from Penguin Paperback Design
- Form from Penguin Paperback Design
- Composition from Penguin Paperback Design
- Surface from Hauntology
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Hauntology
Notice
Archivo; Hauntology used Monotype Grotesque (MT Grotesque), the main face of the Ghost Box front covers, chosen over Helvetica and Clarendon (Bitstream's cut) on Ghost Box back covers and booklets
Text · Penguin Paperback Design
The cover system of Penguin Books, London, from 1935 until Germano Facetti left in 1972. Edward Young's cover set author and title in Gill Sans on a white band between two bands of one colour naming the genre: orange for fiction, green for crime. Genre colours and type-only covers came from Hamburg's Albatross paperbacks. Jan Tschichold (1947-49) fixed type positions and redrew the penguin; Erik Ellegaard Frederiksen's vertical grid, adopted by Hans Schmoller in 1951, made room for a picture; Romek Marber's 1961 grid put the type in a ruled top strip and a picture in two-thirds of the cover.
Fira Sans; Penguin Paperback Design used Gill Sans and Akzidenz-Grotesk
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Penguin Paperback Design, with a counter-accent from Hauntology. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)
-
#f6f3eaground · 36% -
#1a1a1aink · 14% -
#ef7d22accent · 18% -
#c8285faccent · 14% -
#01b2deaccent · 10% -
#2f8a4eaccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f6f3ea;
--ink: #1a1a1a;
--accent-1: #ef7d22;
--accent-2: #c8285f;
--accent-3: #01b2de;
--accent-4: #2f8a4e;
--font-display: "Archivo", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Hauntology & Ghost Box Design: The Ghost Box sleeves and logo, Littler's Scarfolk images and Frances Castle's Clay Pipe sleeves are in copyright, and much of what they imitate (Penguin covers, government public information posters, textbook illustrations, archive photographs) has its own rights holders: build a new fictional institution from public-domain or licensed material rather than copying a Ghost Box sleeve or Penguin's trade dress.
Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid): The Penguin name and penguin symbol belong to the publisher, which still reissues its classic grid covers, and many cover photographs and drawings remain in their makers' copyright: draw your own emblem, do not combine an orange or green three-band cover with a bird emblem and a publisher cartouche so that it passes for Penguin, and never present a new design as a Penguin book.
04
The two styles
05
More combinations
With Hauntology
- Surrealist Graphics Pairs well · House named Max Ernst among his influences: add an Ernst-like collage juxtaposition to a textbook photograph to make an educational image turn eerie.
- London Transport Design Pairs well · Borrow the logic of a public-service programme (fixed elements, a roundel, varied pictures within one system) to give an invented hauntological institution a believable house style.
- Vaporwave Contrasts · Both build nostalgia from found media, but vaporwave mourns consumer electronics in neon pastels on screens while hauntology misremembers public, educational print in flat offset colour on paper; choose which lost future a design should haunt.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Contrasts · House names Peter Saville among his influences, but Saville's Factory sleeves quote one modernist or classical source per record, while Ghost Box invents a whole institution and dresses every release in its one template; choose a single quotation or a fictional series.
- Neo-Swiss Revival Contrasts · Swiss revival uses the modernist grid straight, crisp and current; hauntology keeps a grid but ages its pictures with grain and halftone and lets something uncanny into them.
- Hipster Artisanal Revival Contrasts · Both fake an old firm, but the hipster badge revives Victorian craft for warmth and trust, while hauntology revives a post-war public institution so that it feels slightly wrong.
- Risograph & Indie Print Culture Pairs well · Print the template on a risograph to get real grain, two or three inks and genuine misregistration instead of simulated wear.
- Witch House Graphics (Symbol Names and Haunted Web Imagery) Contrasts · Choose between Ghost Box's fictitious institutional series and this scene's coded artist identity: trade the ruled paperback title band for a glyph-name and a distressed photographic field.
With Penguin Paperback Design
- GOV.UK Design (GDS Style) Pairs well · Both are British systems that set one sans in fixed positions on white and let rules build the hierarchy; GOV.UK refuses pictures and gives each colour one job, so borrow Penguin's one colour per series when a text-led service has to sort many sections at a glance.
- International Typographic Style Pairs well · Facetti and Marber already brought Standard and Helvetica, a rule and ranged-left type to the paperback; borrow a Swiss modular grid to extend the Penguin top strip into a full series system for books or podcasts.
- London Transport Design Pairs well · Both are British systems with a fixed emblem and a Johnston-to-Gill humanist sans; pair London Transport's commissioned pictorial art with Penguin's genre colour bands when one identity has to carry many varied items.
- Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism Pairs well · Rojo's Ediciones Era covers share the white ground, fine rules and one image in a fixed field; combine them for a literary list that needs both a rigid frame and grainy, two-ink photographs.
- Bengali Modernist Book Cover (Prachchhad) Contrasts · Contemporary opposites in literary covers: Signet Press drew a new hand-lettered title for every book, Penguin set the same typeface in the same place on every one; choose by whether the series or the single title should lead.
- Giallo Mondadori Covers (I Libri Gialli) Contrasts · Penguin coded crime with green bands and type only; Mondadori coded it with yellow and a painted window. Borrow Penguin's fixed type positions to tidy a giallo template, or a painted window to warm a banded one.
- Book Blob (Abstract Colour-Blob Literary Fiction Cover) Contrasts · Penguin's bands and grid made every book look like its publisher on purpose. The blob made books from rival houses look like one another, so the cover signals comparable titles rather than an imprint. Borrow a house grid when a series identity should outlast the season's trend.
- Pulp Magazine Cover Pairs well · The paperback cover is the later successor on the newsstand and bookstall; it trades the shouting masthead and painted peril for a restrained, systematic cover.