Awards Book Archive

Girl in Pieces
  • Winner

Designed by
Allison Colpoys
Category
Best Designed Young Adult Cover
Year
2017
Publisher
HarperCollins Publishers

About the Designer

Allison Colpoys is an award-winning designer and illustrator, and the Art Director at Scribe Publications. Her picture books include The Underwater Fancy-dress Parade, Under the Love Umbrella, If All the World Were… and All the Ways To Be Smart. As well as receiving numerous Australian Book Design Awards for her illustration and cover design, she has won the CBCA Crichton Award for Best New Talent and two Australian Book Industry Awards.

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Design Rationale

Charlie is a cutter. She self-harms to deal with the pain of extraordinary loss. She falls apart almost completely before piecing herself together again. The brief: ‘a typographic or illustrative cover with a touch of heaviness; can’t look too difficult, depressing or scary’. To portray Charlie’s wounds and subsequent stitches, without it looking grotesque, I avoided skin imagery, using fabric and thread instead. The sewing is layered to convey that Charlie has been mended in the same places, over and over. Charlie eventually finds solace in art and charcoal drawing, so I used this medium for the other text elements.

Details
Dimensions
135 x 210 mm
No. pages
416
Special finishes
Reverse paper stock. Embossing.
Credits
Internal Design
HarperCollins Design Studio
Photography
Allison Colpoys
Illustration
Allison Colpoys
Printing
Griffin Press
Author
Kathleen Glasgow