A Very Different Christmas Wins Cover Design Award

A Very Different Christmas by Rico Tice and Nate Morgan Locke has been judged one of the best Christian book designs of 2016 by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s Top Shelf Book Cover Awards. The cover was created by The Good Book Company’s Head of Design, André Parker.

A Very Different Christmas is a humorous introduction to Christianity—and last Christmas, thousands of copies were given away by churches and individuals.

TGBC Publishing Director Tim Thornborough commented: “Excellent design is really important to us here at The Good Book Company. They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but inevitably most of us do! But the gospel is beautiful, so we strive to produce books that look beautiful too. We’ve always loved the design of A Very Different Christmas, and we trust that the look and feel of this book encouraged many people to open it up and read the gospel message inside—perhaps even encountering Jesus Christ for the first time. That’s what we’re most excited about.”

Award-winning designer André Parker was quick to give the credit to the source of all creativity: “Every design process and every cover selection meeting starts with prayer—so we can praise God that he was with us as a team. He has always been faithful in guiding our decisions and giving us creativity.”

Designing the cover for A Very Different Christmas presented a particular challenge for André: “With a long title, an even longer subtitle and two authors, there was a lot of text to fit onto a small book! I decided to use the typography to create a single piece of artwork, going for a vintage letterpress look and using a simple two-colour palette. I wanted a clean, elegant but festive look.”

It certainly had the desired affect. The award judges commented: “This was an unexpected and refreshing typographic solution for a Christmas book. The cover was very successful in playing with many different display typefaces and yet has an overall balanced layout. Using mostly black, it also avoided using the typical Christmas colors except with the word “Different”. While this looks easy and fun, it takes an accomplished designer to pull it off.”

A record number of recipients—16 books and 2 Bibles—were chosen this year as winners by the ECPA’s esteemed judging panel of Barbara de Wilde (Creative Director for Cooking and Beta digital product group at The New York Times), Anne Twomey (Vice President and Creative Director at Grand Central Publishing and Warner Books), and Bruce Gore (former Art Director at Simon & Schuster’s Howard Books imprint).