Freelance design writer and editor Roanne Bell lives in London. She left Creative Review magazine, where she was editor of the reviews and design sections and the bi-annual DVD, in August 2003 after four-and-a-half happy years. She continues to produce the DVD, a showcase of current moving image projects. Other clients include Pentagram Design and animation production company Passion Pictures. Roanne has co-edited two books on contemporary illustration with Pentagram partner Angus Hyland: Pen and Mouse (2001) and Hand to Eye (2003), both published by Laurence King Publishing. A third LKP book, Pictures and Words: New Comic Art and Narrative Illustration, co-edited with Creative Review senior writer Mark Sinclair, is due for release in Autumn 2005. Other current projects include an exhibition of new typographic design this Summer in Brooklyn, New York, cocurated with Helen Walters.

More typographic simplicity for Faber & Faber, this time from the studio of Pentagram partner Justus Oehler for the 2001 relaunch of the publisher's poetry series. The brief was to come up with a design that would "join back and frontlist, so that new poets coming to Faber join what is clearly a list going back to the 1920s," explains Faber poetry editor Paul Keegan, "and so that the past and present are made to seem contemporary to one another, which in poetry is the truth of the
matter." The backlist had until now been printed in its original typographic designs, most notably those of post-war graphic designer
Berthold Wolpe from the 1970s and 80s, while very different image-based artwork was employed for the new titles and more recent backlist. Taking inspiration from Wolpe's original jackets, Pentagram designer at the time Matthew Richardson chose to combine Eric Gill's Perpetua typeface with a palette of three colours: one for the author's name, one for the title and one for the ground. Says Richardson: "The text is as big as we can make it with the longest line featured on the cover." "It varies wildly from Tom Paulin's Fivemiletown to Auden's War," he continues, "and that way the text creates an image, almost. Because Perpetua is a serifed typeface it's quite unusual to have the text so big, but at the same time there is a lot of shape and movement." The series was printed in Italy on uncoated stock and with sewn bindings.

Blame Everyone Else, a collaborative project between illustrator Paul Davis and designer Jonathan Ellery of London studio Browns, is not a series of book covers, as other projects featured here, but one book for which three different jackets were made. Designed by Ellery and Lisa Smith, and published by Browns in 2004, the limited edition book showcases a collection of illustrations by Davis alongside words and essays from contributors including designer Fernando Gutiérrez.Three different posters were created to promote the book's launch, each of which cleverly folds down to create a different book jacket, a design process which Ellery describes succinctly as "tricky". If you look closely at the posters you can see the necessary fold marks. Davis drew illustrations specifically for each poster/jacket. One is of a dented car door; the second of a smashed plate while the third is of a spilled glass of red wine. Presumably all accidents for which it may be wise to "blame everyone else". Browns experimented with thirteen different types of paper before finally deciding on Hello Silk 90gsm coated stock from paper manufacturer, Robert Horne.

Launched in summer 2000, this elegant series of volumes of poetry entitled Poet to Poet was published by Faber & Faber. The series is made up of ten volumes; for each one a contemporary writer was invited to select and introduce work by a favourite poet from a different generation. Created by Ron Costley, in-house designer at Faber & Faber, each of the simple yet striking book jackets features a differently coloured spine. That same colour was then used on the understated, type-led covers to underline the names of the two featured writers. "The brief was to give equal emphasis to both the poet and the selector," says Costley. "The solution was simply to underline them."The books themselves are in a beautifully small, pocket book format. "The proportion is one that I have favoured for a long time with books," Costley continues. "It works very well, particularly with poetry.The font used throughout is Minion.

Published by Penguin in September 2004, the series entitled Great Ideas celebrates the written word as a vehicle for pioneering and radical thought. Twenty very different books make up the series. As art director on the project, Penguin's Jim Stoddart gave thirteen covers to in-house Penguin designer David Pearson, five to designer and lecturer Phil Baines, one to designer and lecturer Catherine Dixon and another to Alistair Hall of design studio We Made This.Typography was the basis of the covers' designs, allowing a simple but powerful visual theme to unite the otherwise wildly disparate collection of texts. Each book was printed on uncoated stock with embossed lettering. "The series' unity is reinforced through the use of paper stock, colouring and finishes, which in a tactile sense conveys a very pared-down immediacy, almost mpamphlet-like, and a certain delicacy which these revolutionary ideas might have had at their time of conception," explains Stoddart in an interview with Creative Review magazine.As for the typographic emphasis, Stoddart says simply: "We were keen to avoid using imagery on the covers, as it is the power of the written word that editorially gives this series its potency." The type itself often nods towards the time in which the texts were written. For Marcus Aurelius' Meditations for example, Baines employed a textural design reminiscent of formal imperial inscriptions, using the typeface Mantinia, a contemporary reinterpretation of imperial lettering. For Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a book vital to the development of the modern United States, Baines used Caslon, the same font used in the 1776 American Declaration of Independence. For Nietzsche's Why I Am So Wise, meanwhile, Baines used lettering based on a rough by H van de Verlde for the 1908 title page of Nietzsche's own Ecce Homo. Alistair Hall, meanwhile, adapted the generic Penguin cover design of the 1930s and 40s to create a suitable cover for a series of George Orwell's essays, simply altering the bands of color to fit in with the Great Ideas palette. The project was conceived by Penguin's editorial director Simon Winder.

Penguin Classics published this series of books written by author H.G. Wells earlier this year. London-based illustrator Kate Gibb created the striking illustrations on the covers. Commissioned by Penguin in-house art director Jim Stoddart, who was also designer on the project, Gibb was asked to come up with visual interpretations of fifteen books which fall into three different categories: social fiction; science fiction and political fiction. Gibb didn't have time to read the titles in their entirety, so she drew inspiration for her screen-printed collages from detailed synopses of each title, provided by Penguin editor Helen Conford. Says Gibb of her solution: "After reading the synopses, I relied on my own intuition to provide me with a visual feeling for the title. I wanted each cover to have a predominantly abstract feel but also to have a small figurative reference to bind it to the title." "A Modern Utopia for instance," she continues, "conjures images of a future world, of the coexistence of nature and technology.
The book has a dark, scientific background with vast, bold imagery depicting a whole new lifestyle." With this in mind Gibb set to drawing and cutting up old photos that reflected these different elements, using the results to create collages. A process of trial and error followed, with Gibb printing many different images next to each other on paper before deciding which elements worked together best. The series was published in March 2005.

London-based publishing house Vintage re-packaged a series of author Martin Amis' works in September 2003. Shown here are the effective results. Vintage in-house creative director Suzanne Dean commissioned different designers or illustrators to create the jacket for each of the titles. While each creative was briefed to come up with personal visual interpretations of the book, uniformity was crucial for the series as a whole. As such, Vintage senior designer Eleanor Crow produced a generic grid for each creative to work from. Amis' name, meanwhile, had to appear in the same font and point size within this pre-designed grid. This, explains Dean, "makes the books individual but linked through approach". There are eleven books in the series so far, but the project is ongoing and as other titles come up for re-packaging, cover design will continue to be treated in this way. Jacket credits are as follows: Heavy Water designed by Alan Kitching; Dead Babies by Sebastian Helling; Success by David Pearson; Other People by Susanna Edwards; Times Arrow by design studio, The Chase; London Fields by Alex Williamson; Einstein's Monsters by Abbott Miller, Pentagram; Night Train by Laurence Thomson; Rachel Papers by Lucy McLauchlan; Yellow Dog by Stephen Parker and Money by design studio, Harriman Steel.

Published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2001, this George Orwell series comprises four books, each incorporating one of the author's literary works together with related letters and essays. The chosen books were: Homage to Catalonia (Orwell in Spain); Animal Farm (Orwell and Politics); The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell's England) and Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell and the Dispossessed). Designed by in-house Penguin designer Clare Skeats, the four titles were illustrated by London-based freelance illustrator Marion Deuchars. With a brief to give the four titles a fresh, contemporary look to appeal to a new generation of readers, Deuchars decided that the only thing for it would be to read each book in the location in which it is set. And so she embarked on a short tour of Europe,creating sketches and photographs along her way. These were then scanned into a computer and manipulated to create the finalartworks. "I read Homage to Catalonia in Barcelona and Down and Out in Paris and London while in France," Deuchars says of her mission. "Streets and plazas that I knew well suddenly took on a different perspective. Inconspicuous flags hanging from balconies became political, alleys became places to run from gunfire while the sight of people living on the streets reinforced the idea that in many ways things have changed little for the 'dispossessed' Orwell wrote about some seventy years earlier."