A publisher’s second century

Ashgrove had been publishing continuously since 1931 and had, by its own account, “never once decided what it looked like”. Four decades of jackets sat in the archive with no relationship to each other beyond the quality of the work inside. The brief, as written, asked for a modernisation.

We argued against it. A press with ninety years of printed matter behind it does not need a new visual language; it needs someone to work out which of its existing ones was right. The first eight weeks were spent in the archive rather than in sketchbooks.

What the archive decided

The answer turned out to be a short period in the late forties, when the press was setting its own type and its colophon was drawn by hand. That drawing — seven strokes, slightly uneven, never digitised — became the basis of the wordmark. We redrew it rather than traced it, correcting the two places where the original had clearly been rushed and leaving the three where it had not.

Everything else follows from the books themselves. The grid is derived from the trim sizes Ashgrove already used. The typographic scale is the one its compositors had settled on by 1953. The palette is the paper stock.

The series problem

Six imprints had been allowed to diverge until they read as six publishers. The system re-establishes them as variations on a single spine architecture: fixed position for the mark, fixed measure for the title, and one variable — the horizontal rule that shifts down the spine as a series progresses. Shelved together, the backlist now reads as one publisher with six interests, which is what it is.

What we handed over

A 96-page typographic manual, the drawn wordmark in production formats, the editorial grid as both an InDesign system and a set of web tokens, and the series rules written plainly enough for a freelance designer to follow without calling us. That last part took longer than the mark did.