Harpercollins Award for Best Cover
Shortlist 2008
Designer Aaron Beehre Designer Alan Deare Designer Sarah Maxey
Title Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning
Publisher Christchurch Art Gallery
Format 300mm x 247mm, 220pp, hardcover with poster-size dust jacket
Judges’ comments Bill Hammond: Jingle Jangle Morning is a gift to the reader that keeps on giving: first you luxuriate in the visual opulence of Hammond’s title painting, and take in the deft rendering of that band of white in the middle, with its elegant use of type; then you pick up the book and feel the grain of the cover paper; and finally you open the book and realise that you can unfold what is a wrap-around to see the artwork in its entirety and even use as a poster. Not that you would. (Stick pins in it? Perish the thought)
Title Dear to Me: 100 New Zealanders Write About Their Favourite Poems
Publisher Random House NZ
Format 195mm x 148mm, 128pp, paperback with flaps
Judges’ comments Dear to Me is brave, brave, brave, with strong ‘in ya face’ typography that takes no prisoners. It jam-packs the multi-layered cover with large rounded type that demands you sit up and take notice.
Title Aberhart
Publisher Victoria University Press
Format 270 × 240mm, 304pp, hardcover with dust jacket
Judges’ comments Aberhart, meanwhile, is a masterpiece of bold restraint – the art of knowing when to keep it simple but doing so brilliantly. In this case, that is leaving Laurence Aberhart’s stark spectral black and white photograph to sing its own virtues, with merely his name floating above in the last light of the sky over the Taranaki landscape. The key to the cover’s effectiveness is the use of red in the title typeface, which continues solidly across the spine, back cover and flaps.
