Designer Tom Etherington has been freelance for just over three and a half years, yet going by the variety of design work on his website and Instagram page, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was far longer. But since leaving Penguin in 2021, after six and a half years there, he’s been able to work for a wider range of publishers, both in the UK and US. “I quite like the autonomy of working on my own,” he says, from his base in Sheffield. “Freelance has been really good for that.” He has also been able to venture out beyond book cover design into music and magazine design. 

Etherington’s experience of the latter helped him get his latest job at The Gentlewoman, where he has been working since March having previously collaborated on a special project with the magazine for the 30th anniversary of Bicester Village entitled 1995 (and featuring a special pink ink created for the publication). “What’s really interesting about magazines is that kind of cross-pollination of editorial and design as it happens together,” he says.

Having been used to working as part of a team at Penguin – and then going solo – he is now enjoying the intensity of a busy magazine where, for around three weeks, twice a year, the team comes together at its offices in South Kensington in London during the production of the latest issue.  

Etherington recalls a similar process when he designed The Happy Reader, Penguin’s own bookish magazine, while at the publishers. “Seb Emina, the editor, would come into Penguin and we’d just sit together for two weeks. It was like that’s the only way we could do it – and it works really well.” Compared to book cover design, which can be a largely solitary activity, with contact with an art director, “a magazine is a completely different beast,” he says. “It’s so collaborative all the way through.”

Etherington is originally from Bottesford, a small village near Nottingham, and spent several years in London having studied graphic design at Chelsea College of Art, graduating in 2009. Following a stint working with the photographer Rankin, he went to Penguin and soon became a designer who could capably work across a range of titles. This has only increased as he has moved to freelance work and his client pool has widened.

“[It’s about] gradually building up those relationships,” he says of making the jump to working for himself. “That was one of the things I was worried about when I went freelance, because Jim [Stoddart] at Penguin was so great. I always felt like he had the designers’ backs and he always supported you on what you thought was the strongest cover.”

Etherington says that one lesson in particular he learned from Penguin was the importance of the client-designer relationship and the level of trust required in order to make successful work. “When you go freelance and you’re doing [this] over and over again with new people, it’s hard,” he says.

As a designer there’s often an audacity inherent to the early stages of these relationships: “I think quite often designers do their best work when they’re in their first year of their job and they’ve just done something outrageous that they didn’t even know was outrageous. I look back at some of my first visuals at Penguin and it was … eight point type? What was I thinking? That’s never going to get through!” Etherington praises the attitude of directors like Stoddart who put faith in new designers, enabling them to try things out.

The wider culture of book cover design has also proved to be supportive, says Etherington. “What’s good about being a book cover designer is that it is a really niche little world where everyone knows everyone,” he says. “So after working in-house, a lot of the people who were my friends at Penguin went off to work at other publishers.”

Similarly, the support from institutions such as St Bride in London (which stages frequent book cover design talks) and the ABCD Awards, which celebrate the best in book cover design each year (“democratic to the nth degree,” he says), has proved to be vital sustenance. Book designers lack ego, Etheringon says, and the social side of this small section of the design industry is one of its most attractive parts.

One aspect of book cover design that Etherington has become particularly proficient at is series design. Often an attractive brief for any cover designer, series design offers them a chance to work across several titles by the same author, or within a connective theme. For Etherington, far from seeing the work as restrictive or defined by a set of parameters, series designs are often freeing.

“I think you can get away with a more spare, simple cover with a series design,” he says. “Because there’s a sort of uniformity – once they start looking like a group, they’re very collectible. I think you can get away with more, or get away with less, in a way.”

The ideal book covers for me create a visual image that sums up the feeling of a book – and I think that’s the same as a good record cover

Etherington believes there is often less commercial pressure for a backlist series – via the “opportunity to make [the books] new again” – and potentially more excitement to be had as a designer.

Since leaving Penguin, Etherington’s client list has expanded to include publications like the New York Times and Granta, as well as organisations like the Hay Festival and Deichtorhallen Hamburg. And he has also found himself working on more art and architectural titles with other publishers such as Thame & Hudson, Faber, Hoxton Mini Press and Knopf.

Within this, Etherington has proved adept at collaborating with other artists on covers, with their work pitched perfectly within his design approach, be it a beautiful Angela Harding linocut on James Rebanks’ English Pastoral or a striking John Worrall photograph as used on the cover of William Atkins’ Exiles: Three Island Journeys.

Etherington has also worked on several projects with the artist and designer Scott King, including a book for photographer Gareth McConnell and an art monograph for Sarah Morris, and produced an exhibition of personal work with fellow cover designer, Jon Gray.

Many of Etherington’s most fruitful projects have come off the back of him approaching the client, he says – and this is particularly the case with the music clients he’s worked with, starting with sleeve designs for the band Maximo Park. He sent Paul Smith, the band’s well-read frontman, a book from the Modern Poets series he’d designed, having heard Smith discussing his reading on a Penguin podcast – this led to a series of commissions.

Etherington also got in touch with the musician Tom Rasmussen saying he would love to work with them – they collaborated on a project together and then songwriter Self Esteem saw the resulting work and approached Etherington to design the sleeve of her A Complicated Woman release. “The ideal book covers for me create a visual image that sums up the feeling of a book – and I think that’s the same as a good record cover,” he says.

While prolific on Instagram, Etherington doesn’t share his work until it’s in his hands and is steadfastly against showing rounds of iterations or mock-ups, preferring to reveal the final, finished object. His latest post shows his pared-back cover design for David Gentleman’s new book, Lessons for Young Artists. “He’s one of my heroes,” says Etherington of the 95 year-old artist and designer. “He’s also the most organised author I’ve ever worked with. It’s just an absolute pleasure to go to his house in Camden; he’s got like the best gallery in London. He’s still painting and drawing every single day. He’s an inspiration.”

The David Gentleman cover is understated in a classic Etherington style and is perhaps even a subtle rebuke of some of the techniques that seem to be prevalent in book cover design today, where “all book covers have to be read from 200 metres away when you are running past the bookshop,” he says. “Obviously the internet has had a huge part to play in that everything needs to be seen as a thumbnail now. But I feel like it’s creating this mediocre ‘everything large’ style. Like it’s really interesting to see, when occasionally someone does a cover and it’s really quiet, I feel like it stands out so much.”

tometherington.com, @_tometherington