Best Book and Cover Designs of 2022 Revealed

Remarkable Winners Announced for AIGA’s 50 Books | 50 Covers Competition

New York, NY—Today, AIGA, the professional association for design, announced the results of the AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers of 2022 competition. With 487 book and cover design entries from 27 countries, this year’s competition recognizes and showcases excellence in book design from around the world.

Since its inception in 1923 as the Fifty Books of the Year competition, this annual event highlights AIGA’s continued commitment to uplifting powerful and compelling design in a familiar format we know and love. As book jackets became more prevalent, the competition evolved with the field to acknowledge excellence in cover design. Beginning in 1995, the competition became known as 50 Books | 50 Covers. 

“The jury and I were very impressed with both the quantity and quality of the entries this year, which made choosing only 50 extremely difficult. Having judged the competition before, I noticed a much greater diversity in the subject matter across all the categories, which was refreshing! This was apparent to me among the cookbooks for instance, which focused on diasporic cuisine or in the number of exhibition catalogs devoted to artists of color, for instance. The strongest covers really connected to the content of the book, while the book designs displayed a penchant for material choices that really emphasized the physicality or object quality of the book,” said Andrew Satake Blauvelt, AIGA 50 Books | 50 Covers, Chair. “Among the trending techniques this year were use of exposed bindings and elaborate page sequencing and mixed paper choices. For me, there was a greater overall sophistication in book design, with a mix of aesthetically beautiful and graphically brash approaches in the final choices. While print quality and craft were high, sometimes typographic detailing stumbled.”

Selections from this year’s jurors can be viewed in the Winners Gallery and the Winners List (organized by winner type)

AIGA thanks this year’s panel of esteemed jurors: Andrew Satake Blauvelt, Director, Cranbrook Art Museum (Chair), Rob Giampietro, Creative Director, Renata Graw, Founder, Normal, Ramon Tejada, Designer and Assistant Professor, Graphic Design Department, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Xiaoqing Wang, Art Director, Green Dragon Office. 

The 2022 winning selections will become part of the AIGA collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University’s Butler Library in the city of New York.
 
Eligible entries for the 2022 competition were open to books published and used in the marketplace in 2022. Entries for 50 Books | 50 Covers of 2023 will open in November 2023 with a final entry deadline in February 2024.