Awards Book Archive

No Country Woman
  • Shortlisted

Designed by
Astred Hicks, Design Cherry
Category
Best Designed Non-Fiction Cover
Year
2019
Publisher
Hachette Australia

About the Designer

Astred is a freelance book designer whose distinctive work for a number of publishing houses covers fiction, non-fiction and educational, with a special emphasis on young adult fiction. She is a sometime lecturer in graphic design and was the lead author of the popular text for tertiary students, ‘Graphic design {Australian style manual}’. Astred has won a number of book design awards during her 14 year career in publishing. Recently she has branched out into illustration as well as design…

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Design Rationale

An insightful memoir about displacement that deserved an unsettling cover. I built a typeface, drawing on old school typographical exercises, creating shapes in discordant colours and piecing them together to form letters. Here were the jarring aspects of the author’s identity that ultimately formed the woman she came to be. Earlier concepts were deliberately hard on the eye to convey the idea of culture clash. Sales were unhappy, it was unreadable in e-Book thumbnail form. I resisted their request to add a black keyline, because enclosures would have invalidated the concept. Instead I revised the palette that eased the colour

Details
Dimensions
153 x 234 mm
No. pages
272
Special finishes
Matt Lamination, Spot Gloss UV, Ic magenta background colour which mimics the effect of a PMS
Credits
Internal Design
Bookhouse Sydney
Illustration
Astred Hicks, Design Cherry
Typesetting
Bookhouse Sydney
Printing
McPherson's Printing Group
Author
Zoya Patel