The Placement of the Sun

A post by ABDA member Kåre Martens   Being a Norwegian living in Australia but co-owning a business with mainly Scandinavian clients I must have flown between the two countries at least 40 times over the last 17 years. Apart from noticing via the in-flight entertainment systems that Adam Sandler’s career is going nowhere there is something else […]

Cover Me Christmas: Books I Want To Get (or Give) for the Holidays

It’s the holiday season again and we’re thinking of family and food, holidays and celebrations. Book people, as we know, love to receive books, and the handsomer the package the better. So we are asked ABDA members the question: “What books do you want to get and give because of how it looks?” Here are […]

My Book Design Gateway Drug: Milton Charles and the Covers of V.C. Andrews

A post by ABDA member Miriam Rosenbloom It was 1989 and I was mooching about in the Woodend library – wandering the aisles, feet lazily sparking static on the carpet tiles – when a paperback on the shelf flickered in the light. Shades of red foil surrounded a tiny girl’s face only to reveal, upon […]

The Making of A Fairy Tale

A post by ABDA member Allison Colpoys Once upon a time, I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to design a cover for Jonas T. Bengtsson’s brilliant novel A Fairy Tale. The story is set in northern Europe and is about a father and son who are constantly on the move,  living on the […]

How to Deconstruct a Science Fiction Cover

A post by ABDA member W.H. Chong Orhan Pamuk remarks that if ‘we catch a glimpse of its cover’ we are returned to the long-ago day when we once entered that book. That’s a fond ambition for any cover designer or illustrator, to create such a Proustian machine. In an interview with culture site Spook, […]

The Making of Sepia

A post by ABDA member Debra Billson It can be quite isolating working as a freelance designer. After your work is done and sent out into the universe, you sometimes never hear about a job again. Therefore, when Sepia was voted Designers’ Choice Book of the Year at the 2015 Australian Book Designers Awards, I […]

Through the Covers

A post by ABDA member Josh Durham To the uninitiated the ‘covers’ is a fielding position in the game of cricket that runs from point all the way round to mid-off. A ‘cover drive’ is a drive past cover point. For those of you now scratching your heads wondering what a ‘drive’ is (let alone […]