The Best in Book Spine Type and Book Design: Design 2022 Winners

We’re told not to judge books by their cover, but a lovely logo or design on the front always makes for a more inviting read. These book-based designs from our 2022 Design competition know what we’re talking about!

Tor Books is one of the best publishers of science fiction and fantasy novels in the world, and its imprint Tordotcom gives emerging and established writers a platform from their novellas & novels. It makes sense they need a logo as fantastic as their publications! “Tordotcom Logo” (above) was created by Michael Graziolo American design firm Drive Communications, and won Silver in our 2022 Design competition. Wanting to make something that stood out from their parent publisher, Graziolo pushed for the logo to reflect a more literary bent than traditional science fiction and fantasy work. He designed custom letterforms consisting of straight lines and basic shapes, making a logo that feels vintage yet speaks the language of its subject matter. With the clean and distilled typographic shapes, and a wide variety of iterations, the logo is always legible, even on the thinnest of book spines.

For an actual book cover, we look to a fellow Silver winner, “The Mirror and the Palette” (above), designed by Amanda Hudson from Faceout Studio. The book, written by author Jennifer Higgie and published by Pegasus, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, is about the history of female self-portraiture, spanning back 500 years and looking into the lives of female artists from Frida Kahlo and Artemisia Gentileschi to Amrita Sher-Gil and Gwen John. Hudson, playing off the title, uses one such portrait on the cover, shaped like a palette and surrounded by swabs of paint. With how the woman’s gaze meets the reader’s, the cover works like a mirror, the reader becoming the lady in the picture.

To discover more 2022 Design winners, or to submit a design of your own to our 2023 competition, please visit graphis.com.