Awards Book Archive

Stop Being Reasonable
  • Highly Commended

Designed by
Josh Durham
Category
Best Designed Non-Fiction Cover
Year
2020
Publisher
NewSouth Publishing

About the Designer

Josh worked in magazine design before setting up his company Design by Committee under the mentorship of Australian book design luminary W.H. Chong. He draws upon a broad skill base to offer both illustrative and concept driven solutions to literary fiction, commercial fiction, YA, children’s, non fiction and illustrated book commissions for all of Australia’s leading publishers.

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Design Rationale

A tricky one! Interesting, questioning nonfiction. What does it mean to be reasonable? how can I visually represent reasonableness? I worked through a pile of ideas until I hit upon the idea of a wriggling turtle stuck upside-down not able to flip itself. do we step in and flip the little fella? This seems a neat visual metaphor for the broader themes of the book. I love working on this sort of edgy nonfiction-honing things down to a smart, surprising concept. I got the cover to pop by complementing it with bright colour and quickly scrawled hand typography.

Details
Dimensions
135 x 210 mm
No. pages
224
Credits
Internal Design
Jo Pajor Markus
Typesetting
Jo Pajor-Markus
Printing
Griffin Press
Author
Eleanor Gordon-Smith