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Tag: book covers 2013

50 Books / 50 Covers 2013 Winners

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If you’re an American book designer you probably know already that the winners of the 2013 Fifty Books / Fifty Covers show were announced yesterday.

Organized by Design Observer in association with AIGA and Designers & Books,  50/50, which recognizes the best work in contemporary book and book cover design, dates back to 1922, and is the oldest continuously operating graphic design competition in the United States. It is what you might call a ‘big deal.’

Of course, you can always quibble with lists like this — there are a some covers from last year that I loved that aren’t winners. But it’s wonderful to see book designers get some deserved recognition, and there are some great covers on the list that I overlooked.

Here are a few of my favourite 50 Covers winners that weren’t on my own 2013 list (nor in my postscript):

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The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee; design by Thomas Ng (Oxford University Press)

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No One is Here Except All of Us by Romana Ausubel; design by Gray318 (Riverhead)

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Personae by Sergio De La Pava; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Chicago Press)

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Shady Characters by Keith Houston; design by Jason Booher ((W. W. Norton & Company)

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This and Other Plays by Melissa Gibson; design by Helen Yentus and Jason Booher (Theatre Communications Group)

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The 10 Best Spanish Book Covers 2013

Odisea

Ferran López and friends asked journalists, publishers and other designers for their favourite book covers of 2013. You can see the full list on Ferran’s Tumblr. (Pictured top: Design: Odisea; design by Manuel Estrada)

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Favourite Covers of 2013: A Postscript

I didn’t exactly know what to call this post, but ‘postscript’ seems appropriate.

Every time I post my annual list of favourite covers I immediately see (or remember) a dozen designs that would have been on the list (or would’ve been close) if I did it all over again. This is an attempt to collect a few of those covers from last year in one place. I guess you could call it a list of ‘honourable mentions,’ but that doesn’t seem quite right. Truthfully, it’s a collection of some of the covers that I saw for the the first time, or was gently reminded of, immediately after I posted my original list. It is, as much as anything else, an excuse to post more fantastic work from 2013.

I have been completely overwhelmed by the incredible response to this year’s covers post, and although I could probably do lists like this for the rest of 2014, I won’t. I will save my energy for next December. Happy New Year!


The Book of Immortality by Adam Leith Gollner; design by Tal Goretsky and Janet Hansen

The cover for Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, designed by Tal Goretsky and illustrated by Sean Freeman was also a cracker.


Constable Colgan’s Connect-O-Scope by Stevyn Colgan; illustration by Tom Gauld


The Dinner by Herman Koch; design by Christopher Brand

Christopher Brand did some great covers this year, especially for Crown. I like this one too.


The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by Clive James; design by Rodrigo Corral


Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell; design by David Pearson, illustration Paul Catherall

Yes, it was the year of David Pearson.


The Illicit Happiness of Other People by Manu Joseph; design by Jarrod Taylor


Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht by S. S. Prawer; design by Matt Brand

I also really like Julia Soboleva‘s design for Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens and Ben Goodman‘s cover for Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari.


Roth Unbound by Claudia Roth Pierpont; design by Charlotte Strick, photograph Ken Sharp

Great photo. Great type. Charlotte produced some really lovely work for FSG in 2013.


The Shining by Roger Luckhurst; design by Mark Swan

I liked a lot of the BFI covers (obviously!), but Mark’s design for The Shining struck me as particularly clever. You can read about the design process for all the recent BFI Film Classics here.


Sunland by Don Waters; design by Kimberly Glyder


That Smell and Notes from Prison by Sonallah Ibrahim; design by Paul Sahre

Nicholas Blechman’s cover design list for the New York Times alerted me to this one.


Ulysses by James Joyce; design by Peter Mendelsund

Ok. I had seen this cover and didn’t forget about it either. It was on my list from the start and it got cut at the last minute. I’ve agonised about it since. Sorry Peter.

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Spanish Book Covers of 2013

One of the enduring shortcomings of my end of year covers list is its failure to represent designers from the non-English-speaking world. Having interviewed Spanish designer Ferran López Creative Director for Editorial Planeta (and previously a designer at Random House Mondadori) a few years ago, I’m particularly aware of how much amazing work is being done in Spain and how little of it gets featured here. Fortunately at Unpopular Culture, the blog of Madrid-based independent publisher Pop Editions,  Óscar Palmer has selected his 12 favourite book covers of the year. It’s a good-looking list!

See all of Óscar’s selections

Pictured above (from top to bottom): DIARIO DE 1926, design by Eduardo Jiwnani; LA BANDA QUE ESCRIBÍA TORCIDO, design by Carlos Úbeda; EL ARTE DE LA COCINA FRANCESA, design by Nora Grosse; ROBINSON, design by Juan Pablo Cambariere; LA SOMBRA FUERA DEL TIEMPO, design by Zuri Negrín.

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ABCD and 50/50 Design Contests 2013

Design Observer has announced that they are now accepting entries for this year’s 50 Books/50 Covers competition. The submission deadline is February 20th 2014.

Design Observer, in partnership with AIGA and Designers & Books, began hosting the competition in 2011, and you can see the winners from the previous two years here.

Meanwhile, if you are a designer based in the UK, The Academy of British Cover Design (ABCD) has also announced the opening of its new annual cover design competition.

The competition is open to any cover produced for a book published between January 1 and December 31 2013. Entries must be received by January 31st, 2014.

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Nicholas Blechman’s Best Book Covers of 2013

The great book designer George Salter once said that a good jacket “must be in perfect accord with the literary quality of the book. It must be even more if it is to function as an important sales factor, if it is to ‘stop’ the eye of the person passing by.” Of the thousands of books that come through the offices of the Book Review each year, these are the covers and jackets that caught my eye, that compelled me to flip them over to check the back flap to see who designed them.

If you weren’t satisfied with my 2013 covers list (and why would you be?), then the infinitely more qualified Nicholas Blechman, art director at New York Times Book Review, has selected his best book covers of the year.

Ulysses, redesigned by Peter Mendelsund for Vintage, is on Nicholas’s list,  and I also liked Paul Sahre‘s design for the cover of That Smell and Notes From Prison by Sonallah Ibrahim, and the cover of Without Their Permission by Alex Ohanian designed by Oliver Munday:

We agreed on Gabriele Wilson‘s beautiful cover for Middle C by William Gass, but I think I should compile a list of all the great covers from 2013 that I’ve seen since I posted my list on Tuesday. (I’m kidding. Sort of).

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50 Covers for 2013

I decided to go in a slightly different direction with my covers list this year (see my lists for 2012, 2011, and 2010). It’s just a straight up list of the fifty covers designs with a few annotations and links a long the way. I’m sorry for woeful under-representation of Australian and NZ designers, and for completely ignoring the entire non-English-speaking world. I will try and do better in 2014. But until then, here, in alphabetical order, are my fifty covers of 2013:

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