Style combination · Pairs well
Vicente Rojo × Penguin Paperback Design
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.
Mix them and make something Vicente Rojo 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.
Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)
- Type from Penguin Paperback Design
- Colour from Vicente Rojo
- Form from Penguin Paperback Design
- Composition from Penguin Paperback Design
- Surface from Vicente Rojo
02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Penguin Paperback Design
Grid
Fira Sans, standing in for Gill Sans (Eric Gill, Monotype: author and title on Edward Young's 1935 banded cover, kept with much improved letterspacing in Tschichold's reform)
Text · Vicente Rojo
The design of Mexico City's literary and cultural press, shaped from the 1950s by the Barcelona-born exile Vicente Rojo: México en la Cultura, the Revista de la Universidad, Plural, La Jornada and the covers of Ediciones Era. Taught by Miguel Prieto to add nothing beyond what must be read, it sets an image on white inside a fine rule, orders text with the printer's stock (rules, bullets, stars, pointing hands), prints grainy high-contrast photographs in two inks, and keeps design below the text.
Jost; Vicente Rojo used Bodoni and Egyptian slab serifs
03
The colours
The ground and leading colours come from Vicente Rojo, with a counter-accent from Penguin Paperback Design. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism Penguin Paperback Design (Three Bands to the Marber Grid)
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#f5f2eaground · 36% -
#151515ink · 14% -
#e04a1faccent · 18% -
#ef7d22accent · 14% -
#d9a820accent · 10% -
#c8285faccent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #f5f2ea;
--ink: #151515;
--accent-1: #e04a1f;
--accent-2: #ef7d22;
--accent-3: #d9a820;
--accent-4: #c8285f;
--font-display: "Fira Sans", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Vicente Rojo & Mexican Editorial Modernism: Rojo's covers, his drawn alphabets and the T of his Negaciones paintings are one artist's work: borrow the method (a white ground, a fine rule, the printer's stock, a two-ink treated photograph), not a particular Era cover or his signs, and never present a new design as an Era book. Some covers draw on pre-Hispanic codices (Los indios de México) and Mexican popular imagery (Cien años de soledad); do not lift codex figures as decoration.
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 Vicente Rojo
- American Mid-Century Modernism Contrasts · Both made idea-led covers in the same decades, but American modernists composed asymmetric cut-paper shapes and hand-drawn marks in bright flat colours, while Rojo, who found the US and French advertising manuals he could get in Mexico not to his liking, framed one treated photograph or found vignette on white with a fine rule and Bodoni, Baskerville or Futura, ordering the text with printer's ornaments. Choose Rojo when the type should serve the reading rather than play the joke.
- Di Tella Graphic Design (Instituto Torcuato Di Tella) Pairs well · Two Latin American cultural presses of the 1960s working in one or two inks: add the Di Tella's giant title word to Rojo's framed image and ordered text for a cultural programme or catalogue.
- Taller de Gráfica Popular Pairs well · Rojo set Leopoldo Méndez's engravings in the Revista de la Universidad de México (no. 3, 1971); a black linocut framed by fine rules on a white page joins Mexico City's militant print culture to its editorial modernism.
- Victorian Letterpress & Wood Type Pairs well · Rojo's pointing hands, stars, bullets, double rules, borders and wood types come from the nineteenth-century printer's stock; take a few more of them, sparingly and in hierarchy, to warm a modernist page without crowding it.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Rojo admired Swiss printing such as the Zurich magazine Du, but kept Prieto's axial book page, classical faces and printer's ornaments instead of a modular grid and one neo-grotesque; set them side by side to choose between literary warmth and institutional neutrality.
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.
- 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.
- Hauntology & Ghost Box Design Contrasts · 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.
- 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.