The Disappearing Penguin

The Penguin is one of the most recognisable marks in publishing. So we made it disappear.

To highlight the threat facing emperor penguins as their Antarctic habitat changes, we imagined a simple intervention with Penguin Books: remove the iconic bird from the books themselves.

One missing Penguin becomes curious. A whole shelf of them becomes impossible to ignore. In bookstores, the mystery is finally explained through posters designed in Penguin’s unmistakable visual language — turning the absence of a tiny logo into a warning about something much bigger.

No melting ice caps. No photographs of endangered wildlife. Just an empty space where something familiar used to be.

Sometimes the most powerful way to show something disappearing is to make it disappear.