Best Australian Book Design, 2012

BACK•22 May 2012

We don’t exactly judge a book by its cover here at the Wheeler Centre … but we do appreciate a good-looking book cover, nonetheless.

The Australian Publishers' Association celebrates the best in Australian cover design once a year, with the APA Design Awards. This year’s winners were announced last week; here’s some of them.

Best Designed Book of the Year

*Love Lace: Powerhouse Museum International Lace Award*, Powerhouse Publishing, designed by Toko.

Best Designed Cover of the Year

*The Art of Pasta*, Lucio Galletto & David Dale, Penguin, designed by Daniel New, artist Luke Sciberras.

Young Designer of the Year

Hannah Robinson for *And Red Galoshes*, pictured, Glenda Millard & Jonathan Bentley, Hardie Grant; *The Elegant Art of Falling Apart*, Jessica Jones, Hachette; *Wide Open Road*, Tony Davis, ABC Books; and *Chasing Odysseus*, S.D. Gentill, Pantera Press.

Best Designed Children’s Cover of the Year

*August*, Bernard Beckett, Text, designed by W.H. Chong and Susan Miller.

Best Designed Fiction Book

*Love in the Years of Lunacy*, Mandy Sayer, A&U, designed by Emily O'Neill.

Best Designed Non-Fiction Book

*Hiroshima Nagasaki*, Paul Ham, HarperCollins, designed by Matt Stanton and HarperCollins Design Studio.

Best Designed Literary Fiction Book

*Foal's Bread*, Gillian Mears, A&U, designed by Sandy Cull, gogoGinko, and Yolande Gray.

Best Designed General Illustrated Book

*The Flight Attendant's Shoe*, Prudence Black, NewSouth, designed by Di Quick.

Best Designed Children’s Fiction Book

*Alaska*, Sue Saliba, Penguin, designed by Allison Colpoys.

Best Designed Children’s Picture Book

*Ben & Duck*, Sara Acton, Scholastic, designed by Nicole Stofberg.

Best Designed Children’s Series

*Star League 1: Lights, Camera, Action Hero!*, H.J. Harper, Random House, designed by Nahum Ziersch and Astred Hicks, Design Cherry.

The full list of winners is available at Bookseller and Publisher online.

In the first of a new event series on the art of book design, multi-award-winning cover designer W.H. Chong will present an illustrated talk on how he turned much-loved Australian classics into art for Text Publishing’s Australian Classics series.

Beautiful Books: How To Design an Australian Classic with W.H. Chong will be held at the Wheeler Centre on Thursday 31 May at 6.15pm. Free, but please book.