Four hundred spines that have to look like one shelf

Harker and Vine publish poetry, natural history, translated fiction, art writing, a small children’s list and a reissued modernist backlist. Six imprints, one warehouse, one sales rep, and a bookshop table where all six can appear at once.

The brief asked for a rebrand of the parent identity. The problem was on the spine. A bookseller shelving the backlist could not tell at a glance which books were theirs, and the imprints had drifted far enough apart that two of them were routinely mistaken for other publishers.

We did not unify the covers. Unifying them would have flattened exactly the differences the imprints exist to express. Instead we specified the spine — its typeface, the position and size of the logotype, the fixed baseline the title sits on, and the one element each imprint is free to vary. Everything above and beyond the spine stays the imprint’s own.

The system is a twelve-page document, not a set of templates. That was deliberate: templates get filled in, rules get understood. The house designer sets covers from it directly, and the two freelance designers on the poetry list were briefed from the same twelve pages without needing us in the room.