Last night (Thursday 7th March) saw the convergence of Britain’s best and brightest book cover designers at Gigi’s in Hoxton for the 11th Annual Academy of British Cover Design awards. It was the first time being held in the bar upstairs and I think we were all grateful for the increase in space and the improved ventilation :) Regular compere Jack Smyth was sadly unable to attend but the wonderful Nico Taylor did a brilliant job of hosting (and enforcing the house rule of ‘shut the f**k up’).   Compere Nico Taylor   And without further ado, here are the winners! Young Adult: JAMES ..read more

Eric C. Wilder is a freelance designer living in Upstate New York. Here he takes us through his process for creating three covers for Open Letter Book’s Translator Triptych series. I have previous experience as a packaging designer, so when I get a series like this I tend to look at it as though I’m developing a product line. That is to say, instead of developing three covers for three separate stories, I develop an overarching visual look, and then tailor that look to each individual story. It’s almost like creating a visual language, and then using that language to express three distinct ide ..read more

Beci Kelly is a London-based Illustrator/Designer, currently working as Head of Design, Doubleday at Penguin Random House - Transworld. Here she takes us through her process for designing the stunning cover of Bea Setton’s Berlin. This novel is centred around Daphne, a young and confused 20-something who has just moved to Berlin, seemingly in search of herself, but we never really know if we can trust her accounts of her life or what’s happening around her. Even her thoughts are rather distorted and almost dreamlike. It felt important to focus on Daphne and not the urban city itself, as with a ..read more

Jennifer Heuer is a book cover designer, illustrator, and art director for Penguin Random House. She’s worked out of the Pencil Factory in Brooklyn NY for 10 years. Here she takes us through her fascinating process for designing Island City. In Laura Adamczyk’s novel Island City, we meet a nameless wry and wistful woman who has basically given up. She sells all her belongings and moves back to her hometown which she claims it’s the “perfect place to give up.” She parks herself in a dark local bar and begins to tell her stories to the indifferent regulars around the bar. We only hear her v ..read more

MIT Press’s forthcoming book Voidopolis is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City. Written to reflect the author’s experience of COVID as the physical city emptied of people and activities, the book is printed with missing words and incomplete images. It is illegible in the printed form and readers must use an augmented reality app to read in full. However the app is designed to degrade over time — revealing less and less before renewing itself on an annual basis ..read more

Beth Kephart is an award-winning teacher, the co-founder of Juncture workshops, and a book artist. She is the award-winning author of more than three dozen books in multiple genres, including Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays, and We Are the Words: The Memoir Master Class. Her book Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River (Temple) has become a regional classic. Beth not only wrote My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera but also designed the cover and the gorgeous end papers. Here she takes us through her process. It seemed to me that the p ..read more

Eric C. Wilder is a freelance cover designer. He, along with designer Cherie Chapman, is co-founder of Chapman & Wilder, a studio specializing in book covers, interior layout, and marketing across all genres. Here he takes us through his process for designing the cover for Everything That Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost. Everything That Hurt Us Becomes a Ghost is a poetry collection by deaf Indigenous author Sage Ravenwood, to be published this fall by Gallaudet University Press. For the cover the author wanted to incorporate images of ravens in some way. The brief stated “ravens represent the cro ..read more

Kate Sinclair is a Designer at Penguin Random House Canada. Here she takes us through her process for designing the amazing cover for The Adult. The Adult is a gorgeously written, queer coming-of-age novel about innocence, identity, yearning, sex and poetry. It follows the story of college freshman Natalie—shy and solitary—who meets an older woman and is drawn into a relationship with her.  When I was designing the cover, I started with the title. On the surface, the word ‘adult’ has no moral or dramatic character, it is just a noun. But in the context of the novel, it is a complicated qu ..read more

Jaya Nicely is a Los Angeles based art director, illustrator and designer. Here she takes us through her process for designing the delightfully psychedelic cover for Tweakerworld. Before I began designing this cover, I met with author Jason Yamas to hear more about his story. Tweakerworld is a memoir documenting Jason’s plunge into the ParTy n’ ‘Play (PnP) subculture in the gay community and his subsequent rise as a meth lord in the Bay area. While this book is about heavy topics like addiction, abuse and shame, Jason covers them with humanity and humor. After another discussion with the team ..read more

Emma Dolan is a book designer at Penguin Random House Canada. Here she takes us through her process for designing the stunning cover for Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality. I’m a horror fan, so naturally I was excited when the cover brief for Lindsay Wong’s new book arrived in my inbox. I immediately asked Lindsay’s editor, Deborah Sun de la Cruz, for a copy of the manuscript. As I dug in, I paid close attention to the style and tone of the writing, attempting to draw out the visual personality of the story. If the book were an image, what would it look like? Tell Me Pleasant Things abo ..read more