Paul McCartney: The Lyrics (special edition)

The opportunity to design Paul McCartney’s memoirs was a literal dream project. Like many people, I’m a fan of Paul McCartney, not just in his prolific collaboration with John Lennon, but many of his later songs, with Band on the Run being a favorite. Published by Liveright, Paul McCartney: The Lyrics is a 2 volume set that reaches 874 pages. Inside is a mix of lyrics and personal memories and mementos of his long musical career. There are two versions— one is a widely available standard edition, and the other is a limited signed and numbered edition of which only 175 were sold.

We generally try to incorporate a bespoke typeface into our projects, and this seemed like a good opportunity to design something exclusive for this project. The typeface came about via a stack of our sketched letterforms that had been sitting in a drawer for many years. We had a serif in mind that we wanted to produce but never had the opportunity to finish. A high contrast face with subtle flared serifs and hooked terminals. After designing a beta version of the face, and getting the approval from McCartney and his team, we worked with Omnibus to finalize the design and build out a small family of display and text styles to use throughout the books. This typeface, dubbed Rigby, after the first Beatles melody I can remember listening to, was paired with the lovely Mallory from Tobias Frere-Jones.