HarperCollins Publishers Award for Best Cover 2024
Finalist
Designers: Cover: Toby Curnow, Inhouse
Interior: Arch & Jane MacDonnell, Inhouse
Title: The Chair
Publisher: Objectspace
Format: 240 x 170mm, 272pp, exposed binding
Typography: The Future
The Future Mono (captions and footnotes)
“The premise of this exhibition and accompanying book is simple. One object type – the chair – explored from the earliest documented period of local production through to today. The book is to present all 107 chairs in chronological order along with an introductory essay and index of chairs.
Kris Sowerby’s The Future presented some delightful conceptual moments, featuring experimental alternates with flattened arches as the headline font. The lowercase ‘h’ served as a visual metaphor for a chair. The entire typeface family of The Future was used exclusively, with the mono variant reserved for captions and footnotes. The written chair entries were arranged on a flexible grid system that balanced variance and uniformity. These entries often subtly mirrored chair forms, with the first column sometimes taller than the second, and vice versa.”
Judges’ comments Sat in front of a carpenter’s desk, with shavings on the floor, this cover communicates the obviousness, the promise and the possibility of its subject matter. Immediately it communicates the earnest design intention whilst hiding the form. Super clever. The consideration of the cover to have chair-like type specimens extends to the material the cover is printed on, having heft and texture for a sensory feast. A cover should hero exactly the tone and message of the book and the aesthetic choices of this cover deliver this in spades.
