Designing the Decades...

Ten Years of Blue Peter Books

'Here's some I found earlier' : Blue Peter books spanning the years 1966-1974

Nothing conveys the look and feel of a given era quite like graphic design, and I should know – having spent over a decade re-creating the graphics from vintage TV series for use on DVD sleeves. As an outspoken critic of modern design excesses, I feel that today’s designers could learn a lot (or in many cases, re-learn everything) by looking back to the examples of their predecessors. Today, in the field of childrens’ books and magazines especially, design is too often a garish mash-up of conflicting elements: typography, photography, vivid colours and fake 3d effects, with designers cramming their page layouts in a desperate effort to make them appear ‘fun’ and thereby prolong the waning attention span of their audience. White space is seldom seen, with page backgrounds more often adopting dark or vivid colours. How different from what we find on opening a vintage Blue Peter Book from the 1960s – as I did this week in prepartion for a piece on the series.

The Blue Peter Book first appeared in 1964 , at which time the series itself had been on air for some six years. The first edition was, surprisingly, not produced by the BBC, but by an independent publisher, who had licensed the title from the corporation. It sold well, and the next year BBC Enterprises, knowing a good thing when they saw it, took over publication. Never referred to as an ‘annual’ (with its implied commitment to yearly publication) the books nevertheless continued to appear in time for the Christmas market every year throughout the 1960s and 70s.

The first volume that found its way into my hands had a publication date of 1967, and was the fourth in the series. Interestingly, it was the first edition (and one of only a handful over the complete run) not to feature the faces of the presenters on the cover, with pets Petra, Patch, Jason and Joey (the parrot) in their place. This may have been a result of politics, since the series was undergoing a transition during 1967. Original presenter Christopher Trace was becoming difficult to work with, and his extra-marital affair had provided a subject for press gossip, which didn’t help. Trace was notorious for his threatened resignations, and once John Noakes (introduced early in 1966) had become an accepted part of the format, Trace’s next resignation was accepted by his bosses at the BBC. His appearances in the show became less frequent, and he left permanently in July of 1967. The fourth book would have been in preparation at this time, and its content notably omits Trace completely. Peter Purves, meanwhile, would not join the series until November ‘67, by which time the book was in the shops. So a pet-based cover was the simplest solution.

Stylish, yet restrained: interior spread from the Fourth Blue Peter Book (1967)

The interior design of the fourth book provides an object lesson in restraint and minimalism. The typography is particularly strong, vibrant and contemporary, without going overboard, with fonts echoing those in use elsewhere on television and in magazines. Page layouts are simple, but well-balanced grids, with text set in Baskerville or Grotesk, giving a choice of serif or sans. Headline fonts are all sans, with the then-contemporary Futura Display much in evidence, alongside less easily identifiable examples, most likely from the Univers family. Colours are kept to a minimum, with headlines set in black, green or red. Uniquely for a publication such as this, the designers are credited at the end of the book, albeit by their surnames only: Baker/Broom/Edwards. The same team was on board for the fifth book (published autumn 1968), although the graphics were all-new, with the slab serif Egyptienne face featuring prominently alongside Futura Extra Bold. The balance between textual matter and white space remained attractive, but somehow the fifth book lacks the finesse of its predecessor.

New year, new font: Egyptienne is the title treatment of choice for the Fifth book (1968)

Prior to 1967, the covers of the Blue Peter Books had failed to adopt a consistent approach, with the 1966 edition an orange and blue affair, with a large, sans serif title block, contrasting the red and yellow of 1965 and the yellow/blue of 1964. The fourth book took a new, bolder approach, with its title spanning the width of the cover, in electric blue Windsor, a font reflecting the trend towards Edwardiana that had crept into graphic and interior design from circa 1966. The same look prevailed for 1968, while the 1969 edition, with an all-over dark photographic background, retained the Windsor font, this time in red, with white outlining. Martin Bronkhorst was the designer on 1969’s Sixth Book, with the layout continuing the look of the preceding editions, albeit with increasing instances of photos bleeding off at the edges, where white margins had been more in evidence beforehand.

It was all change for the edition published in 1970, again with an all-over photographic cover. The Windsor font was gone (but would return), replaced by an unidentifiable sans font with a naive, almost hand-drawn quality. The designer this time was one Haydon Young, and the typography throughout is noticeably less confident, and more inconsistent than that of its predecessors. A variety of text fonts is in use – Times, Rockwell, Gill – and the all-white page backgrounds rule has been thrown out, sometimes with less than satisfactory results, as on pages 12 and 13 where some of the instructions for making a cardboard farm are barely readable against a photographic background of the finished model. The worst offence, though, is text cramming. Where 1969’s pages had large header/footer areas, their size was drastically reduced for 1970, while the average font size increased by three or four points, resulting in pages that look too text-heavy and are uninviting to the reader. This looks to me like editorial intervention. While the font sizes of earlier editions made for attractive page layouts, it may have been felt that in some cases the text was too small for young readers. And while the Seventh Book represents a step backwards from the clear, balanced layouts of earlier years, it’s still preferable to anything that modern design has to offer.

How not to do it... text cramming in the seventh and eighth books.

The Eighth Book was again designed by Haydon Young, and this time the typography was, in places, catastrophic. Page 70 is possibly the worst laid-out page in any annual or magazine of the era that I’ve seen, with over a third of it given over to an introductory paragraph set in what looks like 18 or 20-point Grotesk. Elsewhere, a feature on Velazquez is crammed into two pages, with dense Times typography that simply encourages the reader to turn over. It wasn’t all bad, and there are some attractive spreads, but it was a far cry from the exemplary work of Baker, Broom and Edwards. The cover once again featured an all-over photograph, with the title in a drab sans font, airbrushed to give a faux 3d effect.

The Ninth Book, designed by George Mayhew, was a return to form, with the cover marking the return of the Windsor title treatment – this would now become an established element of the cover designs over the following years, and looking back, it can be hard to remember that it was never used on-screen, where the title card was invariably in a plain, heavy sans-serif treatment. The Ninth Book cover returns to the white ground of four and five, albeit with a double border of bright blue and pink, which seems somewhat superfluous. Inside, the layout shows much more restraint, with thoughtful typography, better balance and use of white space, looking much more like the immediate successor to 1968’s edition. There are perhaps too many different text fonts in use, but the effect is never clashing, and there is a notable lack of any overtly contemporary influences. Unfortunately, this would not prove to be the case for much longer.

The Tenth Book, designed by one John Strange, featured a gimmick cover design that I didn’t particularly like at the time. By now there were four regular Blue Peter presenters, Lesley Judd having joined the classic Val/John/Pete axis in 1973. The Tenth cover features all four, albeit as heads and hands only, peering over a large blue square. The design is repeated inside itself, with a sequence of three more coloured squares and a small reproduction of the whole cover in the centre. It’s the old infinity effect, seen many times elsewhere, and whilst it may have seemed novel, to me it just didn’t compare with the ‘proper’ covers featuring a single, large photographic image.

The gimmickry continued inside, with a mish-mash of different title treatments, including a lot of hand-drawn efforts that now look extremely dated. The text setting was generally well balanced, with only a couple of features appearing too long for their available space. The same formula was maintained for the Eleventh Book, with John Strange once again doing the design (although his credit was now part of a general acknowledgement block). The most interesting aspect of the Eleventh Book (published in 1974) is the endpapers, which are nothing more than a copy of the Hard Day’s Night album sleeve of a decade previously...

The Eleventh Blue Peter book was the last edition I received as a Christmas present, and I’d stopped watching the series itself around the end of 1973. Possibly even more so than the programmes themselves, the books remain emblematic of the era in which they were produced, and it’s interesting to observe how they reflect wider trends in design, regrettable or otherwise. The best of them stand the test of time, and in spite of the retro look of certain fonts, still stand as textbook examples of how to lay out an illustrated book page with taste and restraint.

Next time, we’ll have a look at what went into the books themselves and how they related to the content of the TV series.

Bye-bye!