Marber Grid

The Marber Grid was created/invented in 1961, by the Polish graphic designer Romek Marber, he created this grid layout when designing Penguin book covers, this soon became one of the most praised and recognised layouts of all time. In 1961, after being influenced by some of Marber’s designs for The Economist, the Penguin art director at the time Germano Facetti hired him to create some covers for Simeon Potter’s books ‘Language in the Modern World’ and ‘Our Language.’ The covers that Marber created were a success, so Facetti then asked him and associate designers Derek Birdsall and John Sewell to team up and present to him a new approach for Penquin’s series of crime fiction novels. This is when the Marber Grid was created...

Marber carefully noticed and considered that the mystery and crime series style had remained practically the exact same since Edward Young’s typographic designs were first adopted 25 years earlier. Since the crime series was one of Penguin’s most famous and identifiable series, he chose to keep to the roots by keeping the well known green hue of the covers, but instead chose a ‘fresher’ shade to switch it up.

By following the rule of having the basic information (title, author, logo) together within the top third of the page, it allowed him to use over two thirds of the cover to be used by the illustration, effectively giving the cover artwork the space needed. Facetti was so impressed by Marber’s design that he also used it for Penguin’s fiction range, and began to use it again and again practically unchanged, to the blue Pelican books. As time went on, Marber’s layout became the regular layout that was used for the whole range of Penguin paperbacks.