Viva Verde

On the symbolism of green

As many of you know, Zeytin begins with a petite, but deliberate pun.

Zeytin means ‘olive’ in Turkish. And ‘press’ is both the noun you’d expect from a publishing house and the verb for what we do to olives in the process of making olive oil. It’s a name that invites both stillness and movement, depending on how one chooses to see it. Perhaps more delicately, this coexisting contradiction reflects both the patience of nurturing something rooted and the decisive pressure required to transform it into something nourishing.

So, while selecting olive green as a house colour is a natural chromatic extension of that idea, it does more than echo a word. It determines what kind of world our books appear to belong to before anyone has read a single line. Some media identities take that seriously enough to turn a single swatch into intellectual property (IP). National Geographic’s yellow border is literally a registered trademark; that band of yellow alone can stand in for the entire magazine. Penguin’s ‘Penguin Orange’ (#FF6600) has become so closely associated with its paperbacks that an entire classics line is built around it. And The Economist insists on its own ‘Eco Red’ (Pantone 485 C, HEX #E3120B) as the exact red of its masthead and visual system, with detailed rules for how and where it can appear.

Our design imperative

This is precisely the type of discipline we’re looking for, even if our aesthetic language differs. Our books should feel purpose-built to travel, as befits an international press serving international readers. In a practical sense, that means designing for recognition at a distance and the ability to ‘belong’ anywhere. The house colour should behave like a badge, whether the book is on a display table in a bookshop, seen as a spine among dozens on a shelf, tucked under a passenger’s arm in a crowded train station in Mumbai, or accompanying a BBC correspondent who happened to show up early at a Frontline Club speakeasy before their colleagues’ arrival.

At the same time, the visual dimension shouldn’t overwhelm the text itself. The press is ambitious, but not theatrical. Our list pulls from the edges of the human experience, and much of it is shaped by journalistic sourcing, documentary instincts, and cross-industry pathways that lean cinematic. Visually, that’s a challenging concept to articulate, especially since we want to pay hommage to our editorial roots without veering exclusively into magazine imagery. This then leaves us with an aesthetic amalgam that feels British in its typography, Arabesque-Asian in its form, and Turkish-Syriac in its colour palette.

And while this certainly affects the tactile feel of the books we print and the harmony of the covers, the underlying aesthetic logic is designed to translate across media as new layers are added. It needs to hold as illustration enters the system and the work moves through evolving digital, collaborative, and editorial contexts that may never encounter print. Although each format inevitably places different demands on the visual system, the structure should remain recognisably intact throughout. Because the book cover is the most legible place to see how these constraints resolve, we’ll return to it at the end.

Still, this intentionality is loaded with hyper-niche potential; and however far our work stretches, each title should feel like a curated experience wrapped in olive leaves and lingering with the resinous depth of oud. It’s intended to mirror a manuscript review process that prioritizes world-building as a literary skill, nearly above all else. The more immersive, the better. And so, the design needs to hold that intensity without doing the storytelling for the writer.

For Zeytin, the question we asked ourselves when choosing a house colour overlaps with what we ask in our manuscript acquisitions process: ‘what kind of memory, geography, and emotional frame should our books carry with them?’ As we centre on this question, returning to it again and again, how we answer it will invariably evolve, too. And so the ultimate answer is that the colour and covers representing Zeytin should also be synonymous with life itself, and the longevity of it beyond ourselves.

Olive green also maps almost directly on the very diasporic identity from which Zeytin was born, from Anatolia to Andalusia, from the Maghreb to the South Asian belt. And it carries layers of meaning that go far beyond foliage.

But before we dive any deeper into symbolism, it’s worth starting with the eye itself.

A spectral wavelength

There’s a physiological reason to ground in green. Unless you happen to be among the 8% of men and 0.5% of women of the population with some form of red-green colourblindness, your eyes are better at discriminating greens than any other part of the spectrum. We perceive more ‘steps’ (i.e., shades) inside the green gradient than we do inside red or blue. It is the visual equivalent of a drop of rain, which humans are 200,000 times more adept at smelling than a shark is at detecting blood in the water. From an evolutionary biological perspective, the colour green is not only primordially important, but something we unconsciously seek. Our survival once depended on spotting food and predators in foliage, not to mention discerning growth from rot. That bias is still subconsciously there, even if we now spend more time in front of screens than among the trees.

Our colour vision is mediated by three types of cone cells, each tuned to different parts of the spectrum. One is most sensitive to long wavelengths (reds), one to medium wavelengths (greens), and one to shorter wavelengths (blues). The sensitivity curve for the medium-wavelength (M) cones peaks in the green region, around 540–545 nanometres, with the exact peak varying between individuals; this is distinct from the roughly 555-nanometre photopic luminosity peak, which reflects the combined response of all cone types. While the M-cone sensitivity peak and the photopic luminosity peak are distinct phenomena, both situate perceptual emphasis in the green region (especially between lime green and chartreuse), where the visual system is particularly sensitive to small variations. Greens often appear vivid or ‘present’ even at lower light levels or luminance than reds or blues, and even subtle shifts in green hue or saturation can have a disproportionate perceptual effect.

Given that Zeytin’s identity is inherently tied to this colour spectrum by semantics, that sensitivity cuts both ways. A ‘small’ change in green on a designer’s palette is not small for the eye. To shift a few degrees in hue on a colour model can move the association from organic to synthetic, from Mediterranean hillside to a corporate dashboard. This is one of the reasons we treat colour choices as house-level decisions that have to hold across a catalogue, rather than as expressions of individual taste.

In fact, there’s an entire mathematical system defining colours as numerical values (tuples or sets of numbers) called colour models that can help prioritise perceptual accuracy. So it’s design catalysed by intuition, shaped by numerics. Most colour models comprise a small number of dimensions, typically three, which describe colour in terms of attributes such as hue, saturation or chroma, and lightness or value. For example, within HSL (hue, saturation, lightness), hue is the position on the colour wheel, saturation is intensity, and lightness is how close a tone sits to white or black. LCH (lightness, chroma, hue) is a more perceptual space that tries to map those dimensions to how humans actually register differences. In this LCH colour space, one might define an olive with relatively low chroma but stable hue, then build variations by adjusting lightness only. For designers and illustrators working with us, consider this our centre of gravity; we aim to keep the anchor olive’s hue steady, and do our experimenting with lightness, value, and texture rather than dramatic spins around the wheel.

In most perceptual colour models, green sits between yellow (warm) and blue (cool). The direction you lean in matters. For example, a yellow-biased green (more towards olive, chartreuse, lichen) feels sun-exposed, vegetal, terrestrial. But a blue-biased green (more towards teal, pine, emerald) reads colder, deeper, sometimes more digital or institutional. The painters in the room might recall that mixing an olive green begins with a deep cadmium yellow, adding a streak of magenta, and a touch of ultramarine blue.

Colour models naturally segue into Pantone, which is not so much a model of perception but a matching and specification system. It sits downstream of theory, and can help pin down a stable house colour so it can be reproduced consistently across printers, papers, and screens. So, this levels up our thinking from shades that we intuitively like to those that can reliably hold an identity that should extend beyond ourselves. And that’s where chroma enters the conversation. In design terms, chroma is the intensity of a colour relative to a neutral, and it matters because highly saturated tones can dominate hierarchy, drift in reproduction, and date quickly as tastes change, while overly muted tones can lose presence and collapse into the background under different lighting and materials. The task, then, was not to choose low chroma (like sap) or high chroma (like phthalo) as an ideology, but to find the most vivid olive green that could still behave structurally, stabilising the environment around it rather than competing with type, spacing, and imagery.

Bearing this in mind, the two early candidates we considered were Old Wall Green (Hex #7F8B57) and Dusk Olive (Hex #4F5E3B). As we narrowed the range, we stopped evaluating standalone swatches and began considering roles. It made the most sense to set a primary anchor that would carry the overall aesthetic identity; that primary anchor would never be asked to compete with other colours. The secondary anchor within the same hue family exists to support the system through controlled shifts in lightness rather than by introducing a new temperature. A depth tone, if we allow one at all, is reserved for micro-use and only appears in rare, manuscript-driven cases where it is structurally justified rather than decorative. Accents, if used, would be used sparingly, with variation handled through disciplined lightness shifts and strict placement rules rather than expressive colour effects. Even digital neutrals, when required for UI or accessibility, have to sit subtly, introducing no new mood and never pulling focus from the olive. That tees up the palette hierarchy to become a repeatable architecture that can bend according to setting.

For example, on the website, olive is an ambient tone that exists implicitly as an aspect of mood; it’s not necessarily stabilised as a hue constant. Covers, on the other hand, are more strict in that they follow a four-part visual system where the anchor hue is authored and repeatable. You can already see adjacent tones on our current site, such as flickers of muted teal-green that feel like foliage shadow (#3F5C5A), oxidised terracotta (#8C4A3A), and warm stone (#B89A6B), which influence perceived mood even when they are not part of the formal house palette.

One direction pushes olive toward daylight, evoking a sense of sunlit, terrestrial, and a crowning canopy openness created through lighter companions rather than new hues. The anchor (#5A6B3A) sits firmly in the realm of living foliage, with the lighter companions (#7F8B57, #778448) pushing the system toward openness, air, and surface visibility rather than shadow or gravity. The darker accent (#404000), when introduced, supplies necessary contrast and grounding, but it operates as structural ballast rather than emotional depth.

We also considered an earth-oxide palette concept that leans toward a drier, mineral olive. The primary anchor (#7A7651) is supported by darker structural olives (#4A4C20, #30300C), keeping the hue family intact while adding depth. Warm clay and oxidised Venetian reds (#8B331A, #9D6041, #D38670) appear only as restrained accents, introducing human trace and editorial tension rather than decoration. A dusted neutral (#BDAE76) lightens the field, giving the palette an archival, cinematic undertone without overt drama. It reads less botanical and more mineral, which is useful when the text carries heat.

A third direction leans nocturne and editorial, anchored at #5A5F45 and lifted by #6E7358, with depth tones (#3E3D32, #221C12) kept subordinate to type and hierarchy. To assume a slightly edgier, almost sultry angle, a restrained but bold wine red (#560608) could be deployed only when a manuscript structurally calls for rupture, pressure, or gravity.

Finally, we explored a fourth palette that synthesises canopy’s clarity with the tension of the nocturne, a balance between youth and age, day and night. This version centres on a deep, stable olive (#4F5E3B) as the primary anchor, paired with a moss-lichen secondary (#6B7A4E) to introduce variation through lightness rather than contrast. Depth is handled by an olive-charcoal neutral (#3A3F36), used for containment and overlay rather than dominance. The only chromatic departure is a restrained oxidised earth red (#8C4A3A), reserved for rare, manuscript-driven moments where pressure or rupture is structurally justified. The effect is grounded and contemporary, capable of carrying editorial weight without collapsing into shadow or nostalgia.

At this point, historiography overtakes chromatics. Every palette implies a moment it is speaking from, and a set of references it is either continuing or interrupting.

In that sense, taste and time are entangled.

Portrait of a time

For a press drawing on the rich Mediterranean imagery of olives, scrubland, hillsides, sea-adjacent light, a Tuscan yellow-biased, low-saturation green makes far more sense than a blue-biased jewel-tone. This then pulls us away from lime and neon that read as disposable and digital, from harsh army olives that drag in militarised politics, and from saturated grassy greens that feel too much like Western consumer branding.

Admittedly, there was a brief temptation to flirt with faded mint, vintage bottle green, jade-emerald retro, decorative tile palettes, and the broader category of ‘heritage luxury’ green with gold accents. But those categories come with preloaded meanings, and a house colour is too permanent a decision to inherit baggage by accident.

Vintage mint (#A8C3A0) reads as mid-century kitchens, retro postcards, handmade Etsy brands, gentle, nostalgic, and slightly cute. This is all fine and well in a different context, but when it’s employed by a literary press, it loses seriousness, feels lifestyle instead of literature, and evokes memory as décor, not memory as inquiry. Bottle-Green Heritage (#1E3A2B) feels like a legacy traditional publishing house with leather-bound libraries, British club rooms, and luxury whisky bars. For Zeytin, this would introduce the wrong lineage. Instead of land, olives, and sun-filled courtyards, it says gentleman’s library, London, and elite heritage. Emerald Lux (#1E7F46) is also out because it evokes associations with jewelry boxes, perfume brands, and luxury fashion. (Think Kiera Nightleys’s iconic green dress from Atonement). Emerald can have national, religious, or even colonial connotations, regardless of whether that’s intended. Though it adds glamour, this is the opposite of the type of innate elegance, care, and groundedness that Zeytin stands for.

Underneath all three, there is also a risk of drifting into ‘nostalgia as an aesthetic,’ which is far too somber for a press seeking to immortalise the fleeting present. Each book is a firefly in a jar. Our visual intent is to evoke a sense of time passing naturally, rather than a taxidermy stillness. Nostalgia might also unconsciously evoke a sense of ‘before everything changed.’ Which could be interpreted in myriad ways… before migration, colonisation, ‘modernity,’ etc. Different readers project very different meanings to ‘before,’ and for good reason.

Particularly since our list transcribes topics like migration, surviving modern systems, technology intersecting with culture, geopolitical complexity among other facets of life, we felt it was important that the palette commits to a single, recognisable olive hue with disciplined variation in lightness and strict contrast rules, so the system maintains its integrity and the hierarchy is carried by proportion, type, and spacing rather than colour effects.

Left unchecked, nostalgia can also be emotionally directive in ways that outpace the text itself. It only really works when the identity is explicitly about heritage, the emotional frame is part of the product’s promise, and the audience expects sentiment as part of the experience. So, we might see the concept appear in heritage food brands that draw on old creams, deep bottle greens, and muted reds. Their message is that you're participating in tradition and comfort. Vintage fashion and retro cafés often feature sepia tones, washed pastels, and vintage signage colours to convey a sense of ‘we’re preserving an era’. In a literary context, a nostalgia-led cover philosophy would have a palette defined by faded mint, vintage olive, distressed textures, script typography, and yellowed paper tones. The emotional effects would likely try to invoke sentimental, wistful, slightly romantic, and hints of loss and longing.

And yet, to some extent, we’ve eaten our own words in this very column. Although we occasionally refresh the images associated with each article, you’ll notice paintings such as Impression, soleil levant by Claude Monet (1872), Scholar (1878) and Young Woman Reading (1880) by Osman Hamid Bey, Ballet Dancers by Edgar Degas (1890), as well as Strolling Along the Seashore (1909) and A la luz del jardín (1910) by Joaquín Sorolla. And so we are fully aware that we’ve visually wandered into the late Impressionist Movement. Truth be told, that may not be the worst thing in the world for a literary-leaning editorial column, at least until we’ve pinned down an official illustrator. Still, it’s not the aesthetic we strive for in our book covers or foundational identity, particularly given the journalistic and cinematic DNA running throughout much of our list.

Impressionism itself is hardly a neutral reference point. It sits at the tail end of the Ottoman Empire, the peak of British imperial reach, and the rise of industrial magnates and oligarchs, alongside the birth of many of the literary figures still shaping what we call the canon, like Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Émile Zola, W. B. Yeats, George Eliot (a pen name for Mary Ann Evans), Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Kahlil Gibran. And so impressionist imagery remains so sticky in the literary imagination because it overlaps with the iconic work of novelists whose lives spanned the late-imperial, early-modern rupture. The authors became so renowned because they transmuted the times they lived in; so if we draw on impressionist imagery, it is to encourage authors to transmute the life of their time with such similar finesse that it becomes legible to the future, not to romanticise an époque where literature seemed to have a more prominent place.

If you notice, even the painting on the backdrop of our site, The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam by Carl Blechen (1834), sits squarely in the same tension. It, too, is a work from the past and could easily be read as nostalgic. What interests us in it is not a longing for ‘before’, but the almost humid immediacy of the scene is so lush that you would be forgiven for thinking the painting itself was inspired by the Mycenaeans or Babylon. And that atmosphere is largely owed to sheer verdant density. Whether one feels overwhelmed by it or at home is another question, but the viewer does feel there, and that’s the point.

In other words, we’re not above borrowing the past for texture in the spaces where we think aloud, this column included. And while it might make sense for flashes of the past to occasionally seep through present design, we want ample room for both. Where we draw the line is in baking that nostalgia into the house identity itself. The spine system, the house colour, and the core digital presence are built around continuity rather than wistfulness.

To be clear, nostalgia still has its place on occasion, but we don’t bake it into the house identity, colour, formal spine system, or digital ecosystem. Our view is that nostalgia belongs to the writer while continuity is the responsibility of the publisher.

If we’ve done our job well, the reader should intuitively feel that ‘This book reflects humanity as it is today, but understands the web of history.’

The Cover Question

By this point, we’ve discussed green as a perception, as a specification, and even as a historical cue. But we cannot move this from something abstract to tangible without considering how this plays out on the book covers themselves.

Every Zeytin book should feel like a limited-edition object, even when widely printed. Taking inspiration from the French literary scene, where the authority of the content outweighs the cover, we wanted to honor the complexity of the manuscript by refusing to over-interpret it on the reader’s behalf.

And so that means a fixed system with controlled variation. Each jacket is built from locked elements that remain consistent across the catalogue, and variable elements that respond to the individual title. The locked elements include logo placement, title placement block, subtitle block (if present), author block, and publisher mark location. Their consistency across all copies offers visual infrastructure, supporting the identity and hierarchy. Variable elements might include tweaks within texture, shape, light and shadow, potential calligraphic elements that cumulatively create a sense of suspension and floating. But even so, these elements should be used structurally, not decoratively, so they organise space rather than turn the book into a theme.

The same principle governs typology. Industry convention often treats the author’s name as elastic and the title as negotiable, scaling either one based on whether or not the author is famous. We do the opposite in that titles retain primacy and hierarchy across the list, so attention remains on the work rather than on marketing cues. This also means no all-caps titles, ultra-thin weights that have a tendency to disappear, or ornamental display fonts. The intent is to give the reader an opportunity to meet the work first, and allow the system to carry recognition.

We also went to agonising lengths considering the extent to which we should integrate photography in our work. Should full photographic overlays be allowed on book covers, or should photography be limited to web features, digital platforms, and galleries? Although journalism is acutely coded into our DNA, that particular form of photography is intended to collapse interpretation into a single emotional or moral frame before the reader encounters the text. That is the imperative of photojournalism, and it’s a powerful one as it allows the image to become a headline in itself. (That’s especially the case when faces are featured.) But in a book, especially one meant to be reread, collected, and lived with, it often isn’t. Journalism, even threaded into book form, doesn’t require photographic literalism. One could argue that some of the strongest narrative journalism books use photography in ways that could be perceived as oblique, fragmentary, or structural rather than declarative.

Where photography extends the overarching visual system (rather than overriding by offering a narrative conclusion), it can certainly act as texture, field, or trace. That means a photograph might be cropped to abstraction or overlaid with geometry. So, where imagery is used, we are interested in photography that functions as structure, texture, or atmosphere, allowing language to remain the primary site of meaning.

Then, there is the object itself. How it feels in your hands matters, and there are plenty of tactile decisions that come with that. Zeytin leans towards a travel-ready, B-format softcover with a matte finish, delicate and discrete enough to slip in and out of satchels and purses, but rugged enough to take wear in stride. Uncoated stock, visible grain, and simple finishings tend to age with more dignity than gloss or faux-vintage effects because the interest is carried by proportion and material, not novelty.

The outcome we are designing for is simple to describe, even if exacting to execute. At its best, the catalogue should be instantly recognisable at a distance, precise up close, and measured enough that authorship remains foregrounded. Distinction matters, but it should come from the broader catalogue, rather than isolated visual gestures. At the same time, book covers don’t necessarily need to be uniform to create a sense of collective belonging.

So long as the visual space is consciously articulated, the work should feel held by a system that knows when to recede.