Publishing: this is how Utet renews the graphics of its books

News for the publishing house Userwhich features a new graphic project which concerns the entire editorial line of news.

In the new course of the publishing house (now in Mondadori Group) “all covers have an original font in common, title and subtitle in all caps, and a review of the logo and branding. Within these constraints the covers will maintain a variety of format, iconography and composition of the cover”.

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Mattia de Bernardiseditorial director of Utet, underlines: “(…) After more than 300 new products, we felt the need to make our proposal more recognizable, our new products more visibly connected, the individual volumes more clearly part of a line. We worked with the graphic studio that has always followed us, and we are proud to inaugurate our new ‘face’: without sacrificing flexibility and impact, the Utet covers today communicate in a coordinated way the publishing house’s belief in offering intelligent and modern non-fictioncapable of providing sophisticated ideas but also curious stories and original points of view on the world.”

This graphic project is part of a journey that began in 2022 with the creation of two new series to add to the paperback White Classics: Alphabet (a series of new short non-fiction, which has welcomed authors such as Giovanni De Luna and Matteo Bordone) and Library (catalogue series that includes titles such as Noise by Daniel Kahneman, or Atlas of human emotions by Tiffany Watt-Smith)

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Massimo Lafronza of XxYstudio adds: “For this new project we decided to preserve a certain iconographic freedom (paintings, illustrations, photographs…), and therefore the research focused on one new font, soft enough to match the tone of the book from time to time. A font that would be good for a thousand-page historical biography but also for an urgent pamphlet or an essay on super-hero comics. We found it and it’s called Persona: designed by Abyme, which has the detail of being a sans serif display font with variable thicknesses, which gives it an unusual warmth for a stick font, and lends itself to conveying contents of the most varied nature. Persona is called that because it is based in Floridaa font designed in 1931 by Hans Möhring and used in the film titles Person by Ingmar Bergman, and inspired by the Renaissance Florentine typography of the 15th century”.

Adds Lafronza: “Having decided on the typography, we introduced as another element of recognition (and rigidity) the alignment of the texts always to the left, while leaving them free to scroll on the left margin and take on different dimensions depending on specific needs. We kept everything in capital letters, including the subtitle, another unusual element in the publishing world but which here takes on a functional role: for non-fiction, subtitles have an enormous informative weight and with this choice we wanted to give them back the typographical dignity they deserve. The last fixed element is the position and breakdown of the brand and logoplaced at the foot on the two lateral margins as if to create the base on which everything is built: if Utet has a great tradition, the brand is its cornerstone”.

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