THE CRAFTSMAN, Richard Sennett

What an interesting cover! Difficult to read, but certainly eye-catching. Luckily, you only need to read one of the pencils to discover the title and author – unless you read the black one on the left first, which tells you the publisher, or the yellow one two to the right, which lets you know that Boyd Tonkin of the Independent considers the book ‘a masterpiece’.

The front cover

This cover may be difficult to parse – if you’d been told to look out for The Craftsman but not had the cover described to you, you might be in trouble – but the design is bold and appealing. Each pencil is mass-produced, but differs from all the other pencils on the page: they are everyday objects, but individual. I assume this is meant as a nod to Sennett’s main argument in the book, that we should value craftsmanship – from the blurb, ‘the desire to do a job well for its own sake’ – over pure mechanical competition. 

The plain white background, which is carried around the whole cover, is an effective backdrop. It keeps the viewer's focus on the pencil images, and makes the overall design look clean and simple.

The book's spine. Note the legibility of
the text compared to that on the front
cover

The pencil motif is carried around the spine (useful, if you had been told about the cover design and saw the book shelved spine-out), where the red of the pencil acts a a solid background to the title and author text. Due to this image being wider than those on the front cover, and the contrast of white on red, this text is easier to parse. The Penguin logo is unobtrusively sized and positioned to resemble a stationer's logo. I think this example of the pencil as text box is  the most effective of any on this cover.

The back cover

The pencils also appear on the back cover where, thankfully, the designer opted against using them for all the text on the page. One pencil repeats the title and author, and the other features another endorsement. The blurb and remaining endorsements are simply centre-aligned, with quotes coloured red to break up the text.

Overall, The Craftsman's cover is an example of design winning over practicality – but good design, which I think makes it forgivable. The text on the front cover is readable from a close distance, if not several metres away, and the use of text on pencils to present information is a clever design feature that is utilised well. 

Sample collected: 10 May 2012