“BOLD AND BRASH” WINS DESIGNER ALAN DEARE FOUR AWARDS
Four of the eight category awards at last night’s PANZ Book Design Awardsceremony were scooped by Alan Deare, of AREA Design.
The beautifully illustrated On Song: Stories Behind New Zealand’s Pop Classics won both the Gerard Reid Award for Best Book sponsored by Nielsen Book Services and the Random House New Zealand Award for Best Illustrated Book. The awards judges applauded On Song for the way its design embraced the content and musicality of the book, capturing the subject and drawing the reader in with its reference to popular culture.
Convening judge Gideon Keith described it as “a book that truly celebrates New Zealand pop classics; bold, brash, colourful and entertaining.”
Alan Deare was also announced the winner of the Mary Egan Publishing Award for Best Typography and the 1010 Printing Award for Best Cookbook with another title, Hunter from the Heartland: Recipes & Stories from Masterchef Favourite Cameron Petley, a book in which the design elements “all fit perfectly with the apparent blokeishness of the author, handled with enviable grace and style.”
Other winners announced at the ceremony were designers Ali Teo and John O’Reilly who took away the Scholastic New Zealand Award for Best Children’s Book for their title Melu, described by the judges as exuding “quiet confidence indicative of designers in full command of their craft.”
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literaturealso delivered on the night, winning both the HarperCollins Publishers Award for Best Cover (designer Scott Crickett) and the Hachette New Zealand Award for Best Non-Illustrated Book (Scott Crickett and Katrina Duncan).
The judges felt that this was an understated but self-assured piece of design work and that they could “spend a long time exploring the subtleties of Scott Crickett’s design.”
The Pearson Award for Best Educational Book was given to designers Cameron Gibb (Neu Design) and Cheryl Rowe for their simple and elegant design of Essential Maths and Stats for Higher Education, a title that was also shortlisted in the best cover category.
PANZ Young Designer of the Year
The additional highlight of the awards is the PANZ Young Designer of the Year, announced at last night’s ceremony as Auckland freelance designer Kate Barraclough.
The award is presented each year to a designer under the age of 35 for a portfolio of between three and five books, and is judged on artistic merit, innovation of form and appropriateness to the intended market.
Kate Barraclough blew the judges away with the versatile style and palette of fonts used in her five designs for Random House NZ. Convener for the category Megan van Staden said that the judges “felt all her books were strong and diverse” and loved how she “designs appropriately for the subject, in an accessible way that attracts readers.”
2013 PANZ Book Design Awards judges
Convening judge of the PANZ Book Design Awards this year was Gideon Keith, who has worked as a graphic designer for over twenty-five years and is now Creative Partner at Strategy Design & Advertising, Auckland. Judging alongside him were Iain Sharp, Sarah Maxey and Megan van Staden. The convening judge of the PANZ Young Designer of the Year award was Megan van Staden, an in-house designer at Random House and the 2012 Young Designer of the Year.
ENDS
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