Thinking Romek Marber. 10 25 1925

“Sometimes, something accidental occurs that intensifies the work and I am thankful.”

Romek Marber was born on 10 25 1925, in Poland. He moved to England in 1946 and enroll to St.Martin School of Art majoring in Commercial Art and studied at Royal College of Art. By designing cover for the economist its open opportunity for him to design Penguin’s cover and redesign Penguin Crime series covers. In 1960, Germano Facetti was appointed by Penguin books as an art director. Facetti was impressed with The Economist covers designed by Marber and commissioned him to design two covers, our language and Language in the Modern World, by Simeon Potter.

Marber concluded that cover design in the Penguin Crime series must be unite to achieved a visual uniformity for all or some of the components that make up cover. “The grid divides the cover into areas of white and green, determines the typography and the placing of type and picture, and is particularly important when artwork is commissioned from divers illustrators/ designers whose styles differ.”At the end the grid was labelled as “the Marber Grid”.

For penguin cover lovers, Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, a compendium of the Penguin by Illustrators event in 2007, the book features the five presentations by Dennis Bailey, Romek Marber, Jan Pieńkowski, Tony Lyons and Jon Gray, and is supplemented by an introduction by Phil Baines and two further chapters by Quentin Blake and David Gentleman is a must buy.

Source : creativereview