Germano Facetti (5 May 1926 – 8 April 2006) was an Italian
graphic designer who headed design at
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.[Milan
Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...]
, Facetti was arrested in 1943, age 17, for putting up anti-
Fascist posters. He was deported to
Mauthausen
Mauthausen was a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town
A market town is a settlement most common in Europe that obtained by custom or royal charter, in the Middle Ages, a market right, which allowed it to host a regu ...
as a forced labourer, where he met the architect
Ludovico Belgiojoso. At the end of the
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
, Belgiojoso invited Facetti to practice in his studio in Milan.
He moved to
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
in the early 1950s where he took evening classes in typography at the
Central School of Art & Design, and participated in the seminal 1956 exhibition of
pop art, ''
This is Tomorrow'', at the
Whitechapel Gallery
The Whitechapel Gallery is a public art gallery in Whitechapel on the north side of Whitechapel High Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The original building, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opened in 1901 as one of the fir ...
.
By the late 1950s he was art director at Aldus Books and working as an interior designer, working briefly in Paris. It was his interior for the Poetry Bookshop in
Soho
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century.
The area was develo ...
that inspired the director of Penguin,
Allen Lane, to invite him to join as the art director in 1960. Facetti was instrumental in redesigning the Penguin line, introducing
phototypesetting, the '
Marber grid',
offset-litho printing and photography to their paperback covers.
Facetti was also responsible for the black cover designs of the
Penguin Classics
Penguin Classics is an imprint of Penguin Books under which classic works of literature are published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean among other languages. Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the West ...
series from 1963. He recruited a number of leading designers of the day, and one of his important achievements for Penguin was to impose a consistently high standard of cover design.
In November 1971 Facetti traveled to Chile to collaborate in the formation of the School of Graphic Design at the
Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso
The Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso ( es, link=no, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso) (PUCV), also known as ''Universidad Católica de Valparaíso'' (UCV), is one of six Catholic universities in Chile and one of th ...
.
After leaving Penguin in 1972 Facetti worked for the publishing company
Fabbri
Fabbri is an Italian surname. Notable people with the name include:
* Adriana Bisi Fabbri (1881–1918), Italian painter
* Agenore Fabbri (1911–1998), Italian sculptor and painter
* Alan Fabbri (born 1979), Italian politician
* Alejandro Fabbr ...
in Milan. He was invited to join the team by his friend and editorial director Giorgio Giulio Savorelli, with whom he had worked in the past. He collaborated with
Chris Marker on the 1962 groundbreaking experimental new wave film, ''
La jetée
''La Jetée'' () is a 1962 French science fiction featurette directed by Chris Marker and associated with the Left Bank artistic movement. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in tim ...
''.
Publications
While at Penguin, Facetti wrote an account of his design philosophy, ''Identity kits: A Pictorial Survey of Visual Signals''. It was published in 1967 and reprinted in 1971 and 2007.
Death
Facetti died on 8 April 2006, aged 79.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Facetti, Germano
Italian graphic designers
Artists from Milan
1926 births
2006 deaths
Alumni of the Central School of Art and Design
Penguin Books people