As we gear up for Print’s 2015 Regional Design Annual—the 35th anniversary of the competition—we’re bringing you the Best of Region winners from 2014. Last year, for the first time, we asked our judges to select their top design from each of the six regions of the RDA (Far West, Midwest, Southwest, South, East and NYC). We’ll be doing so again in 2015. Don’t miss the chance to have your work spotlighted among the best designs in the country, in our most popular issue of the year.
And the winner for the East is …
Title: New Orleans Review 39.1
Design Firm: Decorative Debris, Rochester, NY
Creative Team: Nancy Bernardo (creative director/art director/designer), Mark Yakich (editor)
Client: Mark Yakich
The New Orleans Review creative team aims to express the uniqueness of each issue while also keeping a cohesive look, so that the Review is easily recognizable as a series. Therefore, each issue retains the same size, body text style and similar spine font.
“Designing for a literary magazine is always a challenge because you don’t want the cover to tell a story since it’s a collection of writings with different interpretations and multiple authors,” Decorative Debris designer Nancy Bernardo says. As such, she found inspiration in Victorian ephemera and ran with it to create a digital collage for the issue, incorporating the initials of every author in the cover and creating frontispieces for each story.
Bernardo was pleased with the results, especially given her one-month turnaround time: “It was wonderful to hold the final printed piece; it was such a solid little book with a cover that represented so many things in a literal and subversive way.”
