Penguin Press designers win Creative Review ‘Best in Book’ award for craft and technical innovation

Congratulations to our in-house team at Penguin Press for winning Creative Review’s annual ‘Best in Book’ award for Craft and Digital Innovation.

The award was given for the campaign around three reissues of Richard Dawkins’ books about evolution, which innovatively demonstrates how the traditions of print can go hand-in-hand with tech. Read more here. 

Combined with a dynamic website (mountimprobable.com), they created a system that generates an infinite number of unique book jackets, echoing evolution itself. The team did this by re-coding several programs originally written by Dawkins 30 years ago that mirror different branches of natural selection. They then used that coding to create thousands of unique biomorphs to appear on printed books, with capacity for infinitely more biomorphs for every re-print. The result is that the jacket of every single copy is unique – a publishing first.

The accompanying website, mountimprobable.com, enables users to develop their very own biomorphs by modifying the inputs that affect the biomorph’s evolution. Artificial selection in action!

Designer Matt Young said: “Too many websites are tagged on to a project like an afterthought. Rather than trying to create something new for the sake of it we always turn to the source – the book – for our inspiration. We’re lucky to publish some of the best books around, and when an author has written over 400 pages of brilliance, you simply need to let the work shine.”

Creative Developer Mathieu Triay said:  “The product is the content. We strive to dig into it to bring back the best nuggets of gold we can find, something we think will appeal to the wider audience, but most importantly something which feels like the book” 

The team have previously won the FutureBook award for Digital Campaign of the Year award for Richard Dawkins’ books. Read more here.