I was responsible for the design of the insides of Penguin Classics throughout much of my time at Penguin. For most of this time they had a lightly specified series style, allowing designers latitude. However, when the Classics were given a cover refresh, we agreed to make the design for the insides more consistent from one volume to the next. Penguin Classics produce a prodigious number of titles, and they include a wide range of textual components: having worked on so many over the years I had a good measure of the scale of what I was taking on.
The first challenge was to agree a basic text page. My task was to satisfy the conflicting demands of keeping the type as large as possible while getting as many words onto the page as possible. The type is larger than I might suggest, and the interlinear spacing is tighter, but I was satisfied with how it turned out.
The running heads are smaller in relation to the text size than I would normally specify, but they looked oversized when larger.
All of the design is controlled through a specification document that runs to 87 pages. The typesetting specification comprises only eighteen of those pages.
Nowadays a lot of this detail would be embedded within an InDesign template, such things were not an option at the time. The rest of the document is made up of illustrations showing how it should all look.
Each element had to be specified and illustrated. And the specification had to include instructions on how the elements interacted.
