Book Design Awards Best Cover 2010: Magpie Hall
Designer Sarah Laing
HarperCollins Award for Best Cover: PANZ Book Design Awards 2010
JUDGES’ COMMENTS
Like it or not, people often do judge a book by its cover, hence cover design is always a major element in the publishing process and can have a significant impact on its success or failure. Several of the best covers this year were to be found on fiction titles, with the winner and one highly commended title being from this genre.
We were looking for covers that arrested our attention, made us want to pick up the book and read the publisher’s blurb, so we sought the cover that would stand out among a sea of others in the bookshop or library. We also paid attention to the back cover and spine, with the shortlisted titles all scoring well in this regard.
The judges quite quickly and unanimously chose Rachael King’s Magpie Hall as the winner. The cover design and the interior artwork were done by Sarah Laing. We thought it an outstanding example of a well designed and executed cover, back and front, that reflects the story in an appealing way.
Alison Wong’s As the Earth Turns Silver was the second fiction title shortlisted, and again we were impressed. Keely O’Shannessy is clearly a talented designer, having had two designs highly commended last year. As with the winning book, both the front and back covers were paid great attention, with the illustrations and text working together especially well.
The book design and image research for Tom Watt’s highly commended title, A Beautiful Game, was done by Carolyn Lewis, with production and origination by PQ Blackwell. This handsome hardback’s subtle and appealing cover challenges our assumptions of what a sports book ought to look like.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Keely O'Shannessy for As the Earth Turns by Alison Wong
Carolyn Lewis for A Beautiful Game by Tom Watt
DESIGNER’S COMMENT
I was sent the first three chapters of Magpie Hall as part of the design brief, and it was saturated with striking imagery – taxidermy,tattoos, gothic mansions. I settled on the tattooed wrist – it seemed like such
a painful place to needle oneself, and it was portentous, the crux of the novel’s mystery. I took the photo of my own wrist on top of my Kashmiri red shawl,the kind of thing Henry Summers might collect on his travels. The magpie image and the type were superimposed in Photoshop. I looked at old-style tattoos for back-cover inspiration, and echoed the shapes in the Kashmiri shawl.
DESIGNER Sarah Laing
TITLE Magpie Hall by Rachael King
PUBLISHER Random House (NZ)
FORMAT 234mm x 152mm, 270pp,paperback with embossed cover
