The cover for the UK and Australian edition of Blue Hunger, published by Scribe, was designed by Luke Bird (and thank you to Guy Ivison at Scribe for providing the design credit). It’s an interesting contrast I think:
I hope you’re keeping safe and well. There’s quite a nice mix of covers this month (I think?). There’s some fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Some paperbacks and some hardcovers. Inevitably there are books from the big folks in NYC, but there’s also some indie titles, and a couple of covers from the UK. There is even some Canadian content for those of you who care about that sort of thing.1
This is the third Rodrigo Corral cover for New Direction’s editions of Dazai. I’m curious — can anyone can tell me the typeface? UPDATE: it’s not a typeface, it’s lettering! Thanks to Erik at New Directions for letting me know (and for sending the final cover)!
Oh and if you’re curious about the enduring popularity of Dazai (who died in 1948), Andrew Martin wrote a piece about it for the the New York Times.
Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan; design by Beth Steidle (Tin House / March 2023)
If one of the fine folks at Tin House would like to send me a higher quality image, I’ll be glad to add it in! Thanks to the fine folks at Tin House for sending over the cover!
Voyager by Nona Fernández; design by Kapo Ng (Graywolf Press / February 2023)
Sam by Allegra Goodman; design by Donna Cheng; photograph by Mariam Sitchinava (Dial Press / January 2023)
I’m not sure exactly why, but I just assumed this was a UK cover when I first saw it (despite it literally having “New York Times Bestselling Author” in all-caps at the top!).
Sing, Nightingale by Marie Hélène Poitras; translated by Rhonda Mullins ; design by Ingrid Paulson (Coach House / February 2023)
For some reason this makes me think of the ‘weird nature’ (including animals with human eyes!) in Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, which is still one of my favourite novels of the last 10 years…
True Life by Adam Zagajewski; design by Jeff Clark (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2023)
I also saw Pete Garceau’s cover for School House Burning by Derek W. Black recently, which snuck past me when it was published by PublicAffairs in September 2020 but still seems terribly au courant…
Wolfish by Erica Berry; design by Keith Hayes; illustration by Rokas Aleliunas (Flatiron / February 2023)
This made me think of the opening credits to a movie from the 1960s. I think it’s partly the type, but the colours also reminded me of Maurice Binder’s title sequence of Charade. Maybe it’s more of the overall vibe than anything else?
The New Life by Tom Crewe; design by Jaya Miceli (Scribner / January 2023)
Interestingly, the cover of the UK edition published by Chatto & Windus uses the same photograph but it’s flipped the other way and printed on one of those fancy half dust jackets (forgive me for not remembering their technical name). I believe the design is by Kris Potter.
The cover of the UK edition published by Fourth Estate was designed by Jo Thomson. It’s interesting to see the same basic concept executed in two very different styles.
The cover of Granta edition The Devil’s Workshop by Jáchym Topol designed by Telegramme Studios was on my list of favourite covers back in 2013 (there were some great covers published that year!). Interesting that the colour palettes are similar.
I should, at this point, rename this post “Young Adult Book Covers I Saw Last Year, Quite Liked, and Could Find Some Credits For.” It would be accurate.
December turned out to be really busy. It is every year. I’m not sure why it still catches me out. That said, 2022 did seem to be especially busy for reasons far, far too boring to get into here (yes, I got sick amongst other things).
I had thought, in fact, that it might be time to retire this particular annual post. But then I looked around to see what other YA cover lists had been posted and… well, it wasn’t great. If I don’t do it, who will?
This year’s list — like last year’s — is full of illustrated covers. It seems to be the dominant trend, and I would really like someone more knowledgeable than me to profile some of the illustrators and put their work in its proper context. Maybe there is an art book in it for an enterprising publisher, if there isn’t one already? There are so many great covers from the past couple of years to choose from. 1
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this very late look at some of the YA covers of 2022. Feel free to leave your thoughts below.
Founded by designers Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan, the Academy of British Cover Design (ABCD) held its first book cover design competition in 2014. To celebrate its tenth awards ceremony this year (where does the time go?), the Academy has decided to allow regular folks to vote for a ‘Winner of All Winners’ from the last nine years – ABCD X.
Committed to making the awards to be as inclusive as possible, ABCD includes categories that frequently get overlooked by other competitions, and the work itself is judged by book cover designers themselves, so there is a diverse selection of winning cover to choose from including children’s books, science fiction and fantasy, series design and non-fiction.
Entries to this year’s regular competition, ABCD’23, are also now open.
The winners of both ABCD X and ABCD’23 with be announced at an awards ceremony on the 23 March.
“Cover design in the US went from being house-styled, design driven and idiosyncratic (think Grove Press or New Directions or whatever Push Pin was up to) to the ‘big book look’ of the 1970s defined by designers like Paul Bacon. Make the type as large as possible, centre it, and combine with some non-specific imagery. That look still defines what we see on the bestseller list to this day. It established a generic way for covers to look and a familiar shorthand for sales teams and booksellers to understand – ‘aah, this must be a … big book!’. It ignored design principles of layout, composition and conceptual thinking that had been codified over the previous 50 years in favour of a commercial literal-ness. It also took away a lot of the fun.”
Jamie Keenan’s review of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s naughty cover for The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie is also a good time.
2022. Twenty twenty-two. Two thousand and twenty-two… “Where did it go?” Or, sobbing, “ are we done yet?” It feels like both. It’s been a year that’s simultaneously dragged on interminably and disappeared in a cognitive blur.
I’m glad other people have already written about it.
At Creative Review, writer and editor Mark Sinclair picked his favourite covers of 2022 and reflected on industry trends in the UK, including the Design Publishing & Inclusivity mentorship program for under-represented creatives launched this year by Ebyan Egal, Donna Payne, and Steve Panton.
Literary Hub posted the best covers of the year as chosen by 31 designers. With a comprehensive 103 covers on the list, it tacitly poses the annual question “what do I have left to add to this conversation?” LitHub have been posting these lists for seven years apparently. I am an ancient desiccated husk.
Fast Company and the Washington Post asked slightly smaller groups of designers to write about their favourites covers.
Designer and art director Matt Dorfman chose the best book covers of 2022 for the New York Times, and empathized with the plight of the designers:
Most often, any personal stylistic expressions in their work are swallowed up in service to the multiple masters — editors, marketing directors, sales teams — who sign off on a book’s cover. There is also the matter of adhering to any one publisher’s dos and don’ts, which can inform mandates about typography, color palettes and production flourishes like embossing or metallic inks. For people employed in a theoretically creative pursuit, designers’ talents are often defined by how effortlessly they can make themselves disappear to serve the book.
Matt Dorfman, New York Times
No one captured the prevailing mood better than this Tom Gauld cartoon. A reminder, if one were needed, that nobody knows anything.
Earlier in the year, Australian reporter Rafqa Touma called out the trend of ‘well dressed and distressed’ young women on covers. As designer Mietta Yans notes, the covers often reflect their books’ stylish and sad protagonists, so I’m not sure this one is on the art departments.
Some of the trends I’ve talked about before spilled over into 2022. Collage, painting (contemporary, and historical — often tightly cropped), big skies, landscapes and seascapes, black and white photography (not just for LGBTQ+ trauma!), retro-ness, idiosyncratic display typefaces. Orange. Pink was in vogue too. The Instagram-ish combination of both pink and orange (sometimes with deep purple-ish blues too) seemed to be very much a thing this year. I suspect this is what happens when you ask designers to make things “pop” one too many times.
It is hard to know if these are genuine trends, or if it is just the stuff I notice. I’m sure there are things going on with commercial covers that I don’t pay enough attention to (although I will not be sad to see the popularity of that flat illustration style — the one that Slate pointed out in TWO THOUSAND AND FIFTEEN! — eventually fade away). I certainly don’t get the sense that everything looks the same, which is often the criticism. There is still room for a little weirdness and that can only be a good thing…
Ghost Music by An Yu; design Suzanne Dean (Harvill Secker / November 2022)Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes; design by Suzanne Dean (Jonathan Cape / April 2022)
The Julian Barnes cover also came in blue, and under the die-cut jacket is a beautiful photo from René Groebli’s photoessay The Eye of Love.
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2022)
Also designed by Na Kim:
Present Tense Machine by Gunnhild Øyehaug; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / January 2022)Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / March 2022)Either/Or by Elif Batuman; design by Na Kim (Penguin Press / May 2022)
You can read about Alban’s design process for Till the Wheels Come Off at Spine.
Worn by Sofi Thanhauser; design by Janet Hansen (Pantheon / January 2022)
Also designed by Janet Hansen:
A Country of Strangers by D. Nurkse; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / April 2022)Sedating Elaine by Dawn Winter; design by Janet Hansen (Knopf / April 2022)
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère; design by Rodrigo Corral (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / August 2022)
This month’s post includes a few covers that I missed earlier in the year along side the new and recent releases. I’m starting to think about my annual recap so please let me know if you think I’ve overlooked any other particularly notable covers that stood out for you and/or seemed emblematic of wider trends in 2022.
And just a reminder with all the stuff going on with social media that if you’d prefer to get new posts auto-magically emailed to you, you can subscribe here. I have also re-opened comments on new posts after closing them for a few months if you want to politely share your thoughts below.
“Fuuuuuuuuuck….!” is the only way I can describe the mixture of awe and annoyance that I hadn’t thought of it I felt when I saw this cover. So simple and so clever.
This has a very similar ‘obscured face collage’ feel to Tristan Offit’s cover for Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens, which I thought I had posted here earlier in the year but apparently did not (probably because I didn’t — and still don’t! — know who designed the cover of the UK edition (it was designed by Mel Four, photograph by Marta Bevacqua) and I wanted to post them together?).
Pacifique by Sarah L. Taggart; design by Natalie Olsen (Coach House Books / October 2022)
People Person by Candice Carty-Williams; design by Emma A. Van Deun (Scout Press / September 2022)
Mr. Keenan also designed the cover for the Liveright edition of The Waste Land itself a few years ago.
(The US edition of Matthew Hollis’s book, forthcoming from W. W. Norton, also has an interesting cover. If anyone from Norton would like to send me a hi-res image with the design credit, I’ll be happy to add it in!)
Rodrigo Corral also designed the cover of Ling Ma’s previous novel Severance.
Canción by Eduardo Halfon; design by Alban Fischer (Bellevue Literary Press / September 2022)
Drive by James Sallis; design by David Litman (Poisoned Pen Press / September 2022)
I was just talking about this book — how it is a near perfect thriller, but also great for dudes who don’t read a lot of fiction — so I was happy to see it’s been given a new lick of paint. And pink covers are, as I keep saying ad nauseam, a thing…
I’m including this because of the beautiful photo (with a colour palette remarkably on trend in 2022) and my inevitable teenage crush on indie style icon Miki from Lush.
Sacrificio by Ernesto Mestre-Reed; design by Dana Li (SoHo Press / September 2022)
This reminded me Peter Mendelsund‘s Amerika cover for Schocken back in the day. But, as is the norm around here, the two covers do not actually look that much alike side by side…
It’s been a while since I posted about author, illustrator and designer Coralie Bickford-Smith. In a new video for Penguin Books she talks about her creative process, her work on the original Clothbound Classics, and Penguin’s new Little Clothbound editions.
