“I have a book cover designer friend who says you should only ever stay in a job for six years, and after that you need to leave. He is really adamant that it’s six years,” says designer Tom Etherington, who has just left publishing house Penguin Press after – you guessed it – six years, though he insists the timing is a coincidence rather than a fulfilment of his friend’s logic.

Etherington readily admits the design role at Penguin Press had been his dream role. “I was looking at the Penguin website every other week to see if a job had come up,” he recalls. Finally, Penguin was looking for someone with experience in illustration – the publishing company was starting to embrace more illustrated titles – and magazines, to cover work on the Happy Reader, the title Penguin Random House publishes in collaboration with Fantastic Man. Joining from Rankin Photography, where he worked on photo books and its fashion magazine, Hunger, Etherington fit the bill.

For the next six years, he worked on a blend of projects across Penguin Press, home to imprints including Penguin Classics and Allen Lane: “I would work on book covers, and then also illustrated titles, designing the whole book, and then every six months, I’d work on the Happy Reader magazine. So it felt like a really nice balance of different projects, which I think is quite rare in publishing. I think a lot of book cover designers are just book cover designers.”

During his tenure, Etherington was the designer on projects that picked up awards and made end-of-year lists (including several of our own). One of his later projects at Penguin Press was the simple yet beautifully ethereal set of covers for the newly launched Green Ideas series. He also worked on the inventive Penguin Classics campaign, Happy Reading, celebrating the dog-eared books we return to time and time again.

“I’ve worked on some amazing projects there and I’ve been really lucky to design some great books for great authors, and I just think now is a good time to take a new challenge and work with other people,” he says. “The publishing industry is quite small really, and a lot of people that I have worked with have moved on to other publishers. So I’m in a good position where I actually know people that can commission me, which is the hardest part of setting up as a freelancer, I think.” Yet changing his day-to-day role wasn’t the only reason behind his move.

The decision arose from a lot of factors, including “a lot of financial and life decisions”, he explains. “Me and my partner have just had a baby. I think a lot of people my age are finding this: that they get to their 30s and they maybe settle down, and I basically just couldn’t afford to stay in London. So I was trying to think what I could do. I think it caused a lot of discussions and thinking about what our next step was, and we’ve decided to move to Sheffield. I think maybe the generation before me were the last generation that could really afford to stay in London, you know, unless they’re very wealthy.”

Etherington has lived in London for 15 years, however it no longer felt like his life and career had to be geared around the capital. “I think the creative industries in the UK are changing now. I can see it,” he says, highlighting the directory of studios and agencies outside of London which was created by designers Alice Fraser, Craig Oldham and Mike Ash.

“I mean, there’s always been great design studios all over the country. But I feel like right now, not only are there lots of things going on, I think a lot of people are exiting London, just with Covid and with house prices and living costs. So I don’t know. I think we decided that we didn’t want to live 50 miles out of London in a tiny village and never actually spend any time in the city. We’d rather live in Sheffield, which has an amazing creative scene, it’s got lots of cool things going on. I’m working with And Other Stories who are a publisher based there and I’m sharing a studio with a photographer, so it just felt like I could have more creative existence there rather than commuting for two hours every day.”

During the last two years, Etherington has worked at Penguin Press for four days a week, which he says has eased him into the ways of freelancing – as have the last few years of remote working: “I’ve heard a lot of people say working on your own is tough, but in a way, I’m fortunate that I’d had two years of Covid to experience that anyway. I’ve been working from a bedroom anyway.”

He does anticipate a change in pace, however. “In-house at Penguin, we’re given a lot of time,” he says, praising the generosity of Jim Stoddart, his art director at Penguin Press. “He’s a great boss really. He’s just a great art director in that he gives you lots of space and lots of time, and lets you figure things out yourself, which I think is really rare. I’ve not really had it before working for him. And I think that six years working for him has really made me as a designer, and it’s given me a chance to experiment and probably make loads of mistakes and figure things out.

“Obviously, when you are freelance, there’s less room and time to do that, because your time is your money,” he says. “And the business side of things I have no idea [about], so I’m going to have to learn that quite sharply, and managing workloads as well – at Penguin, I always took on too much work, but then I could always step back and get some help or talk to people. I think it’s going to be interesting doing that. And as I’ve spoken to other book cover designers, everyone says you’ll have loads of projects one month, and none the next, so that sounds quite scary, with a mortgage and baby!”

He is aware he is opting out of the organic collaboration of working within a department, too. “I think I will miss the art department. There was 11 of us as designers, picture researchers, an art worker, studio manager and then Jim, and they’re all just the most talented, lovely people,” he says. Every Monday morning, the team would come together for a coffee to ease back into the new week and go through work in progress together. “It was just the most gentle start to the week,” he says. “I will miss that, but I think I’m going to have to create my own community. I feel like the book cover design scene in the UK is really quite friendly. It’s genuinely a really nice community of people.”

Between the people he met through Penguin Press, and the community and friendships he established through design talks and events (“gradually you see the same people enough and you make friends”), there is a strong network out there, which he hopes will plug gaps in his solo venture and provide that all-important second opinion.

“I’ve got some freelancer friends and we all feel like we need that opportunity to share work and talk about work, so I’ve got a WhatsApp group, and there’s talk of doing a weekly Zoom. Recreating those social things in-house out of house, I think, is going to be key, because otherwise I think I’d go crazy and just end up creating terrible work,” he says. “Even if it’s just someone walking behind your screen at work and being like, ‘Oh, that looks nice’. I think that sometimes makes all the difference.”

In his own practice, he hopes to broaden his horizons beyond book publishing, whether working with galleries or musicians, including continuing his work with the band Maxïmo Park. “Anything in the cultural sphere,” he says, with the hope that, as a solo designer without the responsibility of huge overheads or salaries to pay (the merits of which we explored here), he’ll have the luxury of being fairly selective.

“I think because I’m a one-man studio, basically, I can be a bit more choosy with what I pick, and I don’t have to make the big bucks to keep the studio running. So I think keeping things small makes it more creatively fulfilling, hopefully. This is week two, so I could be completely wrong!” he says.

Back in the world of book cover design, he has been working on a title by art historian and podcaster Katy Hessel, as well as a collaborative book documenting Black British culture through photography and poetry, handled by Johny Pitts and Roger Robinson respectively, called Home is Not a Place. “We’ve had one meeting, and it was literally the most creative meeting I’ve ever been to! It was amazing. I was like, how am I allowed to be here, and this is my work? We had Roger reading out poems and then we just had this really long table of all the photos, and we were gradually going through them and creating some kind of narrative,” he says.

As for his relationship with Penguin? “I definitely hope to carry on working with Jim,” he says. It’s perhaps inevitable that he’ll be bumping into the publishing company again at some point: “I mean they’re more than half the publishing industry in the UK or something ridiculous, so I guess I will be!”

tometherington.com