Thursday 23 February 2012

14 Picador 40s

Over the years the once-classy-looking Picador series has come to look a bit neglected: absorption into the Macmillan behemoth, often so-so cover designs, and a steady bleeding of their top authors to other publishers have all contributed to this. (The Australian arm of the company is something of an exception to this, with a strong set of authors and books.) But for the imprint's 40th anniversary, they are redesigning a number of their top books with dramatic monochrome covers in black, grey and white. Click for much bigger versions. Designers as yet unknown. Neil Lang, senior in-house designer at Picador, designed these. Note that 4 of them have been updated--see the end of the post for the final versions.






The only disappointing one here, since it's just the boring old cover in silhouette



And from the Australian contingent:





UPDATE: The updated final versions referred to above...





7 comments:

eViL pOp TaRt said...

The first two are particularly striking.

Ian Koviak said...

all very nice. Big fan of the black and white look. Your kids can color them in, that's why.

Anonymous said...

Neil Lang, an in house designer, did these. Also, these are earlier visuals. Bridget Jones, Last Orders, Line of Beauty and White Noise have all changed slightly.

Ian Koviak said...

some different takes here on his site: http://aldr.in/

JRSM said...

Thank you all. Anon, I'll update the post.

Ian, colour-in covers is a really good idea: you could do them on that nicely textured matt card that Penguin used for the draw-your-own-covers classics a few years ago.

Anonymous said...

Have you seen the moving animated version of the book covers as well? http://bit.ly/y9EEfi

HENRY FRY said...

The first seven or so really are lovely. It's a shame about the Bridget Jones cover. Perhaps they thought it wasn't worth a drastic revamp??