For the fourth series of Penguin's Great Ideas books, we were asked to design a cover for The Writings of the Zen Masters, a collection of short texts that illustrate the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. It's the first book we've done where we've managed to remove both the title and the author name from the front cover!
The design features an enso, or circle, painted with a Japanese bamboo brush. We tried using sumi ink initially, which comes in a solid stick, and which you grind with water on an ink stone, but we couldn't quite get the right density of black, so in the end used a more standard black ink.
The enso relates to Zen notions of enlightenment, strength, and elegance; the painter should ideally create the circle in a single fluid movement, the shape then revealing the spirit of the artist.
The focus of Zen Buddhism is the achievement of enlightenment through meditation, rather than a scholarly focus on long texts, so it felt right to strip the cover back to the most elegant and simple of forms, particularly one so closely associated with Zen.
We also created a stylised hanko, or seal, crafted to represent a simplified version of the Penguin logo.
The New Statesmen reviewed the series: "...the overall standard is very high... [the] anthology of Zen fables... gets a simple "O" painted with a brush, but underneath is the zinger, a tiny violet pictogram of a penguin."
