Germano Facetti; Independent obit (Penguin cover designer)
Hyfler/Rosner
The Independent
15 April 2006
By Phil Baines
Germano Facetti, designer: born Milan 5 May 1928; Cover Art
Director, Penguin Books 1960-72; married Mary Crittall (one
daughter); died Sarzana, Italy 8 April 2006.
Germano Facetti was best known in Britain as Cover Art
Director for Penguin Books from 1960 to 1972. His cover
designs and those under his directorship epitomise the very
best of 1960s graphic design, with clear typography allied
to pertinent imagery.
Facetti was born in Milan in 1928 and spent part of the
Second World War in the Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen,
in Austria. His early career was spent on a variety of
design projects and with the architectural practice Banfi,
Belgiojoso, Peressutti & Rogers in Milan, where he met and
married the English architect Mary Crittall. They came to
Britain in 1950.
In London, Facetti attended Edward Wright's evening classes
in typography at the Central School of Arts and Craft. He
worked with Theo Crosby and Ed Wright in 1956 on the
entrance area of the seminal exhibition "This is Tomorrow"
at the Whitechapel Art Gallery; he also designed the Poetry
Bookshop in Soho. A brief spell in Paris followed, where he
worked as an interior designer for the marketing arm of the
advertising agency Snip, and helped set up the Snark Picture
Library.
On his return to Britain he was brought into Penguin Books
by Allen Lane's dynamic new Chief Editor, Tony Godwin, who
realised that to meet the challenge of younger, more
aggressive publishers Penguin would have to change the way
it presented its books.
Facetti found that Penguin had many series of books whose
appearance was quite disparate: some were exquisite examples
of traditional typography, some uncertain flirtations with
contemporary design idioms, and others whose only unifying
element was the logo. His job was to transform them into
something contemporary to attract new and younger readers,
while retaining the loyalty of the existing readership.
While for many series he used the established Penguin
colours to re- assert the identity of the company, his
fundamental impact was in unifying the entire company's
output through a more defined and consistent use of
illustration, photography and collage, supported by simple
"modern" typography using the newly available typefaces
Standard, Helvetica and Univers.
Facetti's first series overhaul was Crime, for which he
commissioned a design from the Polish-born designer Romek
Marber. This featured a defined area for the publisher's and
author's name, title and logo and a clear area below for an
illustration. The images were dark but striking, and were
printed in black, a brighter "Crime green" than previously
used, and occasionally one other colour.
The results appeared in 1962 and Facetti saw the advantages
of the new look immediately. He adopted the layout for
Fiction (in orange) and Pelican titles (in blue), and later
for Modern Classics. The Fiction covers were less successful
than Crime, not least because he was often forced to reuse
existing artwork, but for the Pelican titles the grid worked
well, particularly when used with more diagrammatic, or
collage-based illustrations.
His direction of this series was able to build on earlier
work by John Curtis, and although the Marber grid was
dropped after a couple of years, a clear Pelican identity
was retained and continued well into the 1970s under David
Pelham.
The horizontal division of space introduced with the Crime
titles was also used for Penguin Classics which were
redesigned with black covers featuring full-colour
reproductions of art contemporary with the period of
writing: ". . . it was assumed that the majority of great
works of art have been created with a bearing to
literature," Facetti later wrote. This approach still
underpins the picture research of Penguin Classics today.
The use of images continued ideas Facetti had previously
explored as Art Director at Aldus Books in the 1950s. There,
working on educational handbooks, Facetti integrated text
and images in an almost cinematic, documentary manner, made
possible by his wide-ranging, encyclopedic knowledge of art
and design history.
In addition to the Classics, other series at Penguin
featuring a similar use of artwork included the English
Library, Modern Classics, and Reference. Although the
Fiction covers were not to Godwin's taste (he appointed a
separate Fiction Cover Art Director in 1965) Facetti was
able to design arresting covers for books of a topical
nature, like the Specials series, which documented the
urgent questions of the day - civil unrest, Europe,
disarmament. These books were written very quickly and the
covers designed accordingly: the restraint of the cover
arrangement was relaxed and impact and directness were the
order of the day. Other series with more varied cover
treatments included Shakespeare (with David Gentleman's
woodcuts), Penguin Plays and Cookery.
A key element to Facetti's success was his choice of
freelance and staff designers. Derek Birdsall, Alan
Fletcher, Colin Forbes, David Gentleman, Richard Hollis,
Jock Kinneir, Romek Marber, Bruce Robertson, Alan Spain,
Denise Yorke, a Who's Who of the significant designers of
the day, are some of those credited on the back covers of
books from the time.
Aside from Penguin, Facetti also found time to act as
consultant in the late 1960s to Purnell's illustrated
History of the 20th Century, published in weekly parts. He
also designed Cape Editions and Jonathan Cape's Jackdaw
series, was a founder member of D&AD (the Designers and Art
Directors Association) and worked as art director for New
Society.
In 1972 Facetti left Penguin and returned to Italy where he
worked in both publishing and teaching. In a 1967 article
describing his work, he said
Not all the covers shown here are thrilling from the point
of view of design. It is much more important that Penguin
has established a high standard throughout, rather than
swinging from very good to very bad, cover to cover, as
almost all other publishers do.
Looking at his work in its entirety, it is clear that the
"high standard throughout" was very high indeed.
Germano Facetti, designer: born Milan 5 May 1928; Cover Art
Director, Penguin Books 1960-72; married Mary Crittall (one
daughter); died Sarzana, Italy 8 April 2006.