Ben Juers highly commended in the ABDAs for Best Designed Young Adult Cover

We’re pleased with the news that Ben Juers was highly commended in the Best Designed Young Adult Cover award for his illustrated design for Rawah Arja’s The F Team at last week’s Australian Book Design Awards, with the judges commenting:

Innovation is always bound to impress, with The F Team featuring a bold illustration that evokes drama and interesting typographic treatment [which] combine to create an eye-catching cover which breaks the mould of young adult covers.

Describing the rationale for the cover, Juers said:

In designing the cover for Rawah Arja’s The F Team, I aimed to reflect the story’s anarchic energy, and make it stand out from other Young Adult novels. I wanted to strike a balance between precision and chaos, in keeping with the nature of rugby (around which the story revolves) and the dynamics underlying it, which are constantly in flux: friendship, animosity, cultural difference, masculinity. To this end, I looked to the expressionist, off-kilter charm of Lyonel Feininger and the efficiency of European ligne claire cartooning as models.

Ben Juers is a cartoonist, book cover designer and teacher. He is a co-ordinator at Glom Press and a member of Workers Art Collective, Trades Hall Artists Studio, Workers Solidarity and Other Worlds Zine Fair. Follow him on instagram @benjuers.