When Arthur Buxton stumbled across a super-organised archive of Penguin’s science fiction, he thought it would be interesting to look at how the covers of the books had changed over time. He was right — and the labour of his work is this striking visualisation.
Each timeline represents all the iterations of a cover in chronological order. Within each bar chart, length corresponds to the time in print and the dive most prominent colours are shown proportionally.
It’s interesting to see how the classic penguin styling was tossed aside for decades, only to reappear recently. You can buy a copy of the full visualisation as a printed poster for $US60.
[Arthur Buxton via Flowing Data]