A book can change anyone
For 90 years, Penguin has offered more than books – it's been a trusted companion and a catalyst for connection the world over.
To recognise this monumental anniversary, Penguin Books embarked on an ambitious and immersive programme of events and activities to showcase the brand’s extraordinary influence on people and culture – past, present and future.
Our task as part of this year-long celebration? Create a bold, playful and thought-provoking video to illuminate Penguin’s enduring spirit – one that’s brought people together through the power of stories since 1935.
Through the pages
But how do you condense 90 years of culture-shaping history into just 90 seconds? To meet this challenge, our creative team immersed themselves in Penguin’s fascinating archive to absorb everything they could about this iconic brand.
We learned all about their groundbreaking origins, and Allen Lane’s audacious plan to bring books to the masses. We drooled over their pioneering graphic design principles. We discovered a huge amount about the impact of their books on culture and society. We looked at our own bookshelves and considered the impact of Penguin’s pages on our own lives.
When we re-surfaced, we knew what we wanted to do: capture the spirit of Penguin’s pages ‘through the pages’ themselves, creating a highly textural, collage-led animation.
Ultimately, we wanted to take the audience on the same immersive, awe-inspiring journey through the archives that we had just experienced – bringing them right through to the present day, and looking ahead to the challenges and opportunities ahead.
“Dignified flippancy”
In the late 1930s, the iconic Penguin logo was originally selected for the brand due to its “dignified flippancy”, and this helped set the tone for the whole project. To begin, we chose to spotlight the logo within its familiar bookish surroundings, visualising how it’s changed over the decades in a flipbook-style animation to signify a jump back in time to 1935.
From there, the animation tells a chronological story, representing Penguin’s – and the wider world’s – evolution over the last nine decades.
In the final third of the film, we pause in the present, and look towards the future, ending on a hopeful, inspiring and playful note.
Endless layers of wonder
Using a scrapbook-style, stop motion approach, we selected a representative range of book covers, archive images and vintage news footage to feature on the ‘pages’, housed within culturally relevant collages. The accompanying colour palettes shift with the times.
We wanted this film to sound as textural as it looked, with rich sound design that captured both the intimate act of turning a page alongside a broader soundscape to represent the consequences of those very page turns.
A pitch-perfect voiceover from the legendary Joanna Lumley and an original piece of music composed by Joe Jury provided the perfect finishing touches for a project that was a joy to work on from start to finish.
