Academy of British Cover Design launches vote for ‘winner of all winners’ to mark 10th awards ceremony

The Academy of British Cover Design (ABCD) is asking the public to vote for a "winner of all winners" to mark its 10th award ceremony.

The public can cast their vote here, and the winner will be announced together with the winners of ABCD’23, at an awards ceremony on 23rd March, the ABCD website and social media.

The ABCD was set up by the designers Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan in 2014. Its central ethos was one of inclusivity, so genres that generally got overlooked (such as children’s book covers) would be one of 10 categories. These are: Mass Market, Crime/Thriller, Young Adult, Children’s 0-5, Children’s 6-12, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Non-Fiction, Classics/Reissue, Series Design and Literary Fiction.

It was important to the pair that there would be no fee to enter work for the competition and even entry to its awards evening would be free. Its first competition received around 1,300 entries, which were whittled down to six covers in each category (or 12 in non-fiction) by a jury of 10 cover designers.

On the evening more than 300 people turned up and each voted for their favourite cover in each category. These votes were counted on the spot and the awards were then presented. The winners included designer David Pearson for his iconic, redacted Penguin Classics design of George Orwell’s 1984 and Sharon King-Chai for her design of Charm and Strange by Stephanie Kuehn (Electric Monkey). Since then ABCD has presented 90 winners in these 10 categories.

In 2022, designer Anna Morrison and art director Richard Ogle won in the Young Adult category for their cover design for Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura (Doubleday), and designer Caroline Young and illustrator Anna Schmidt won in the Mass Market category for How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie (Borough Press), for example. The full list of winners and shortlisted creators in each year can be found here.