LONDON — Every so often it seems apt to celebrate the modest, unobtrusive, generally forgotten genre of design that I call “quietly good design.” It probably isn’t a coincidence that I generally feel like doing so at this time of year, a few weeks after the entirely immodest, ultraobtrusive hullabaloo of the Milan Furniture Fair.

A quietly good design project is exactly what the name suggests. It isn’t necessarily innovative or iconoclastic, but it fulfills its function in so subtle and unshowy a manner that it somehow brings us pleasure. Here are four recent examples of design that do just that.

Image To create the covers for the new Penguin Great Food series, the designer Coralie Bickford-Smith drew inspiration from the illustrations of traditional tableware and cooking pots found in old ceramic history books and manufacturers’ catalogs. Credit... Penguin Books

1. Penguin Great Food books When the British publisher Allen Lane founded Penguin in 1935, his objective was to make good writing available to the masses in paperback books costing sixpence each, roughly the same price as a pack of 10 cigarettes. He insisted that the books’ design should reflect the quality of the texts, saying: “I have never been able to understand why cheap books should not also be well-designed, for good design is no more expensive than bad.” Quite.