Design Council of Saskatchewan

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Premier's Awards for Excellence in Design

Graphic Design Category

Award of Excellence

“Treacherous” Book Design
Confidant Communications
Allan Dowdeswell

Design Statement
This book is Paul Derry’s account of his life as an RCMP agent among the Hells Angels, and how he came to be wrongly labeled as “Treacherous” in the RCMP agent rating system. This label eventually helped to allow a murder that Derry tried desperately to prevent.

The design objectives for this project were to name the book appropriately, to communicate the author’s desperation, and to give a sense of his dangerous situation and lifestyle, all with the end goal of creating a cover intriguing enough to help sell the book. The final design achieves these goals and also helps to illustrate how the author’s calls to the police were frustratingly ineffective.

After meeting the desired design objectives for the cover, the next challenge that needed to be overcome was that the book text was a bit short compared to other books in the same genre. The publisher wanted the page count to be over 200 so as to increase the perceived value to the customer. At the same time, they also wanted the page size to be as large as possible, again so as to compete effectively against similar books and to display the cover art effectively. Careful typography and page layout choices had to be made so as to provide the maximum number of pages without giving a feeling of the pages being too empty.

Award of Merit

Koenig & Associates Christmas Card
Hal Schrenk Graphic Design
Hal Schrenk