For 91 years–almost five lifetimes in penguin years–Alan, the slightly rotund mascot of Penguin Books, has performed his ambassadorial duties with the stoic composure of a tuxedo-clad ambassador who has never once considered doing a cartwheel. Now, the iconic logo has a whole waddle of Playful Penguins–who can dance, high-five, and carry improbable stacks of books–to keep him company.
Penguin Random House UK unveiled the campaign on March 5, World Book Day in the United Kingdom, announcing that the company had “grown a rich archive of ‘dignified yet flippant’ birds in all their hand-drawn glory.” The new characters, created by London-based illustrator Matt Blease, were designed to sit alongside Alan, rather than replace the emperor penguin, who has been ruling the roost for nearly a century.
Of albatrosses, pelicans and a very smelly zoo
The full Playful Penguins character kit, a modular library of poses and props designed for use across campaigns. Illustration by Matt Blease for Penguin Random House UK. (Source: Penguin Random House UK/LinkedIn)
The story of Alan, who though flightless itself has witnessed billions of flights of fancy, incidentally begins with an albatross, a bird famed for its tremendous wingspan. In 1932, a German publishing house called Albatross Books launched mass-market paperbacks. They chose the bird because an name albatross is known by the same name in most European languages.
When Allen Lane, inspired by the albatross’ flight, decided to publish affordable British paperbacks three years later, he had a bird theme already in mind, and arrived at the penguin on the suggestion of his secretary Joan Coles, as recounted in a September 2020 retrospective on penguin.co.uk.
The logo was entrusted to 21-year-old designer Edward Young, who was dispatched to the London Zoo posthaste to sketch from life. In ‘Penguin by Design: A Cover Story, 1935-2005’, Phil Baines recounts that Young “remarked on how much the birds stank.”
Penguin found a name for its sister non-fiction imprint, The Pelican, quite serendipitously after a customer was overheard asking for one of those pelican books,” archivist Hannah Lowery recounted to penguin.co.uk in 2020, Lane’s response was not to correct them but to immediately launch one. Young drew that logo too, and both birds survive to this day.
Penguin on a treadmill
Like any aging star, Alan has been touched up several times over the decades. Typographer Jan Tschichold redrew Young’s original in 1946, producing a version that held for nearly 60 years before design firm Pentagram was called in. Partner Angus Hyland told penguin.co.uk that the the studio found that decades of photocopying had done their worst, and Tschichold’s version had been “corrupted through bad reproduction, redrawing or early digitisation and probably a combination of all three.”
The 2003 restoration lifted Alan’s beak to appear more “chipper,” repositioned his feet, and, most memorably, made the penguin 15 per cent slimmer. Hyland humourously described it to penguin.co.uk as “putting the 50-year-old on the treadmill.” The slimming, however, had little to do with aesthetics and had taken place to allow the logo to fit a paperback spine no wider than 15 millimetres. So, the slimmer penguin simply stood taller.
A kit, not a cast
Attempts to use penguins beyond the logo always encountered the same problem. As designer and commentator Ryan Selvy observed in a YouTube video published March 15, 2026, they “always feel like knockoffs, like someone’s drawing the logo from memory, just different enough to feel unofficial.” The Playful Penguins were commissioned to fix this properly.
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The character library shows how well the brief was understood. The penguins are not Alan in different hats, they are looser, rounder, more openly delighted. They are seen belly-sliding, lugging books with the urgency of someone who has just found a sale, and balancing cocktail trays with considerable élan among a bevvy of other poses.
A kit of props–Christmas trees, beach umbrellas, and confetti–lets them be assembled across campaigns and events.
Design Lead Derek Man explained in Penguin Random House UK’s March 2026 LinkedIn announcement: “Rather than having preset scenes, our solution was to create a kit: a collection of poses and props that can be mixed and matched to fit a wide range of messaging.” Blease, posting on Instagram (@mattblease) the same month, described months spent “waddling through hundreds of sketches,” before cutting each character in lino and printing by hand—”my nod,” he wrote, “to the printing press.”
As Selvy put it, the Playful Penguins handle “all the expressive stuff that a logo just can’t do,” while Alan stays on the spine.
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Alan, who started his life as a sketch dashed off at a malodorous zoo enclosure in 1935, turns 91 this year, but happily he no longer has to carry the brand alone. Luckily, for him, the new arrivals are considerably better fun, and know how to party.
References
Baines, Phil. “Penguin by Design.” Allen Lane, 2005.
Blease, Matt (@mattblease). Instagram. March 2026.
“How the Penguin Logo Has Evolved Through the Years.” Penguin.co.uk, Sept. 15, 2020, penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/penguin-books-logo-history-edward-young-allen-lane.
Lees-Maffei, Grace, ed. “Iconic Designs: 50 Stories About 50 Things.” Bloomsbury, 2015.
Penguin Random House UK. LinkedIn. March 2026.
Selvy, Ryan. “Is Penguin Books About to Change Their Logo?” YouTube, March 15, 2026.
The full Playful Penguins character kit, a modular library of poses and props designed for use across campaigns. Illustration by Matt Blease for Penguin Random House UK. (Source: Penguin Random House UK/LinkedIn)