Common Worship - John Morgan Studio:
Following the main redesign of the Church of England prayer books in 2000 by Derek Birdsall, these well-known books have been designed by John Morgan Studio for over 10 years.
The books bring the traditional, religious texts into the 21st Century through typographic detailing and considered layouts. The combination of spot colours, stock colours, line weights and type weights lend themselves to the readability and immediacy of the book. As it is to be used in Church of England churches across the country, it was important that the books remained in contact with their traditional routes:
'Printing and religion have a long and intimately connected history. The first book to be printed from movable type was a Bible, and ever since then the faiths – especially the Christian faith – have been carried, developed, spread, and challenged by this marvellous human invention. For a typographer, the chance to design a new edition of one of the central books of worship must surely be a forbidding task.
At the designer’s back is a great legacy of publication, the bulk of it from the centuries before “design” came to be a profession separate from the editing of texts and the printing of them. It would seem wrong to impose “design” on such a book. Rather, the book should be allowed to design itself. That is an old credo, and one with which Derek Birdsall and John Morgan, the designers of this new work, have long been familiar.
Though still in his twenties, Morgan grew up with this precept as a student of typography at the University of Reading. Birdsall’s career is now in its fourth decade and he has vast experience. But in no other of the jobs he has tackled can this injunction have been more deeply true.'
- Robin Kinross, Baseline 33
To see the project in full on John Morgan Studio's website, click here.