Just realised that I needed to catch the voting deadline for the BSFA awards, and I have hastily ranked the nominees for Best Art as follows, before scanning and emailing my ballot:
1) Ben Greene – ‘A Deafened Plea for Peace’, cover for Crossed Genres 21
2) Andy Bigwood – cover for Conflicts (Newcon Press)
3) Charlie Harbour – cover for Fun With Rainbows by Gareth Owens (Immersion Press)
4) Adam Tredowski – cover for Finch, by Jeff Vandermeer (Corvus)
5) Joey Hi-Fi – cover for Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
6) Dominic Harman – cover for The [sic] Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Gollancz)
I don’t claim to have much aesthetic sensitivity in this area, and am impressed by Maureen Kincaid Speller’s analysis of the nominees in the course of which she comes to a completely different and probably more robust set of preferences.
(My votes in the other categories: Best Novel, Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction. I never got round to listening to the podcasts, and have excluded one of the others, so my Non-Fiction ballot has votes for only three of the five.)
Yes, I am just mystified by the supposedly professional comms people who cannot see the difference between friendly editing for readability, and total bland control of all output!!!
To generalise even further, there is nothing that cannot be improved by other people looking at it!