Brief consisted of short question-based books, written by top thinkers in the field of contemporary political economy. The books were to be published in a small format and read in a single sitting by a wide general audience of readers. Typography should be simple and easy to read. Design should accommodate legible titles with very variable lengths and, since authors are well-known, their name should be clearly visible. Design had to be easily extended and create a consistent style throughout the whole series.
The solution: A fixed set of bright vivid contrasted colours, bold straightforward typography — Grotzec Condensed by Mário Feliciano — resulting in a contemporary “for all” pop style that could appeal to the wider audience the publisher was aiming at. Additionally a visual twist by highlighting parts of the full title and thus creating a second/follow up question, which almost always works as a reinforcement of the initial one, generates visual curiosity and renders the books less formal and intimidating.
— FBA.design
Polity is a leading international publisher in the social sciences and humanities fields, with offices in Cambridge and Oxford in the UK and Boston in the US. This work was awarded a Certificate of Excellence by Communication Arts.
An acute accent is used instead of the actual apostrophe. The book cover shown in the first image of this post shows a straight apostrophe. Neither is the typographically correct form which typically looks like a raised comma. In Unicode, the proper apostrophe unfortunately shares a codepoint with the (English) “Right Single Quotation Mark” for historical reasons.