What a great look back at the books of 2008! I feel like I just grazed my way through a large and sumptuous (if somewhat bizarre) breakfast buffet. :)

What?? No runner-up (at least) for the elegant, lovely CHAINS cover? The SAVVY art is great but that typography is a disaster...

Chains. Good point about Chains. That was a brilliant brilliant cover. I suppose the only reason I didn't include was . . . um . . . okay, so I sorta forgot about it. >gulp< But I will defend the typography of Savvy. Didn't have a problem with it, myself.

Great list. However, one problem in your category: Picture Books Containing Painted Newsprint -
The Storyteller's Candle by Lucia Gonzalez, illustrated by Lulu Delacre... The newsprint is not painted. -- Lulu says that she used the actual newsprint of the time period and even tried to find articles talking about whatever she was showing in the pictures. For example, on the pages where she talks about immigrants, she has newsprint which lists names of ship's passengers/ immigrants. -wendieOld

Thank you for your praise of the illustrators and designers who actually pay attention to content for their cover art! It's so important!

I know it's a picture book format, but I'd say Endpapers Award would definitely go to "The Red Shoes" illustrated by Sun Yoo if that were a category.

And yeah...as a Type student I second "working illustrator" in his critique of that Saavy type...yikes! it's breaking every rule of typographic integrity/good cover design.

What about "The Black Pearls" cover, by illustrator Rebecca Guay? (by Louise Hawes) Check it out!

Everyday schlub that I am I need one of you illustrators to explain to me this typography issue. What rules are being broken, precisely? To the untrained eye it seems okay, but that's undoubtedly because I've not studied subject. "Black Pearls" is indeed lovely, this is true. And rather than say "painted newsprint" I'll change it to "integrated newsprint" since the point was less that the print was painted upon but worked into the basic illustrations.

Yes, I hate hearing design and art discussed in terms of rules. If it looks good, it is good, is the only rule. Having said that I'm not a fan of the Savvy type.

And the Gollywhomper Games cover! I only hope that the sales and marketing team who made them change from the Rocco cover to something that looks LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE is shown this post.

yes, thanks for showing the ARC of the Gollywhomper and the change to the current cover...wow!! i'd love to find out the reasons why things like that happen!

Ah, typography. It's not a job; it's priesthood. Although I'm only the merest novice, I'll take a crack at explanation and maybe it'll inspire other, wiser voices to come in and correct me. The basic idea, as I understand it, is that the type on a cover has a bunch of different jobs: it should integrate into the illustration, communicate some sense of the content and just generally work as part of the cover's visual team. How well any particular typographic choice or set of choices succeeds in this job is largely a matter of taste, which is why disputes in this area are always so... well, disputatious. To my eye - to my taste - the type on the SAVVY cover looks shallow and kind of cheap. It's just kind of slapped down over the art. It looks like type you'd see on a cereal box: Sugar-Frosted Whammos! The art is rich and lush and layered. I think it calls for a type treatment that's more subtle, mysterious. Magical. In short, the whole thing looks to me like a rich velvet gown worn with a plastic party hat. The CHAINS cover , on the other hand, uses a font that integrates beautifully with the period-folk art feeling of the illustration. One of the genius things about it is that its visuals - type and illustration - signal the period of the book's setting while still having a contemporary feeling and impact. It's a fully modern sentence spoken in period dialect, which is very, very hard to pull off. A good point of contrast here is the cover of the new OCTAVIAN NOTHING book, which - despite beautifully painted cover art - is a dead (and deadly literal) presentation of historical elements. Somebody made a list of stuff that had to be included - costume, check, character, check, background detail, check - then found a basically inoffensive way to arrange it in a layout. It's a museum exhibit - look! Living History! - and although there's nothing wrong with that, the CHAINS cover is more: it doesn't just avoid the pitfalls. It transcends them and does it in a way that connects you first to the human feeling and only then to the history lesson. When you look at that cover, you see the whole before you see the parts; when you investigate the parts, they reinforce the whole. All those design 'rules' are mostly about avoiding known pitfalls but for designers - for all of us! - mere avoidance of pitfalls isn't the same thing as success. For that you have to have to carry whatever design problem you're dealing with beyond a place of mere solution and into a place of concise, encompassing elegance... a place of poetry. If illustrators in particular get nuts about typography, it's because we can work very hard to get to that poetry place, only to have the whole enterprise sunk by thoughtless, rushed, unconsidering design choices outside of our control. If I were Brandon Dorman (and I hasten to add that I'm not), I'd have taken one look at the final SAVVY cover and needed a good stiff drink and a long angry phone call with a sympathetic friend. But that's just me.

That's a blog post right there, my friend. I'm just ill-equipped to write it. Now you have me incredibly curious about this "typography" thing of which you speak. In general, who makes choices about the title's type? Does the illustrator ever have any say or is it entirely up to the Art Director? Can a third party come in and throw on a title that no one likes but the people at B&N? So many questions... Thanks for this!

Filed under "it depends". On who the people involved are (famous/influential/well-informed vs. not), which publisher it is, how close to the final deadline we are and loads of other factors. Basic default: art director and/or designer, but their work is subject to veto/input by well, everyone on earth, basically... up to but not usually including illustrator and author. Sales force, certainly, and chain store buyers get to weigh in at the very least. But two points I should add to the above - ridiculously verbose - post: first, that it's way, way easier to critique design (or anything ele) than it is to create it. God only knows what time pressure and shifting managerial winds the designer of the SAVVY cover had to deal with in arriving at the final work. Even in the course of disliking it, we ought to acknowledge that no one ever has time enough to get every decision right. Second - and this is said in purest love and admiration - the world of type is one of the purest geekdoms in all the world. People who catch the type bug are not like you and me: they see things that we cannot. Minute differences in the width and depth of descenders are as clear to them as the differences in sound between Swedish and Swahili. The volume inside the curve of a lower-case 'g' can sing them love songs or send them screaming out of the room. If you'd like a peek down the rabbit hole, take a look at the typography table on the second floor of the Strand next time you're there. World of wonder, I promise.

Hey Betsy,
Thanks for the shout out on Gollywhopper. I was a bit let down that they changed the cover too because I really liked the title treatment that Paul Zakris over at Greenwillow had done for it. In response to the other covers you posted...have to agree that the Chains cover is gorgeous, I also have always been arrested by the Savvy cover (at first I thought it was Mary Grand Pre'), but one of my favorites this year was the cover for a YA called simply, Bird. I would love to know who did it, it looks like the work of Jon Foster but I am not sure.

Whoa, Fuse. You are impossibly well-read! I added the Golden Fuse Awards to the big list at the blog.

In the "best oblique literary allusions category," BLISS by Lauren Myracle references a former student named Agnes Nutter at the main character's school. I realize the book is YA and YA is not the focus here, but I think I uttered an audible "NO WAY" when I read that.

Oh my gosh, I agree about Savvy. I'm no expert, but when I first saw the cover I thought, "

Oops, sorry about that. :o( I thought: Beautiful cover!... Why is THAT the font they used for the title? It's ugly!

Have you seen the cover for Benedict Carey's The Unknown? It's a direct relative to the Ruby Key, with the stances and such.

Similar, yes indeed. Hadn't heard of that one until you brought it up. Thanks for pointed it out to me. Any book starring kids named Lady Di and Tom Jones has my interest.

Hey Elizabeth, thanks so much for giving The Facttracker a GFA! I'm refering to the book of course, not the person, but can't figure out how to italicize here. If only there was some place I could learn about typography...