At the Light Table 016

The Victoria Book Prize Society oversees the City of Victoria Butler Book Prize and the Bolen Books Children’s Book Prize. The prizes honour literary achievement and showcase the talented authors who contribute to the culture of Greater Victoria. I myself was honoured this year to be asked to update the society's icon used to identify the prizes.

Initially, I used Google to take a look at the literary prizes and awards landscape across Canada and the world for inspiration.

With these icons and logos in mind, I doodled various roughs jamming as many concepts around books, printing, paper, folios and Victoria into the roughs as I could imagine. 

From these roughs, I refined a few favourites and sent them off to my contact at the Book Prize Society, Teresa Bubela of Orca Books, for review.

Teresa was drawn to the capital V with the pages. This concept retains a bit of the original Book Prize Society logo included in the landscape image above. I took this concept and went a bit over the top with roughs which included floral embellishments and other whimsy around the capital. This isn't the only rough, but I'm not going to reproduce the others!

The simple approach seemed to take hold, and with that I created a series of variations to explore various borders, textures and colours. 

The straight-ahead approach, which maintains a woodblock print's hand-carved appeal, was Teresa's preference. The call for entries for this year has been announced, and the icon is now central to the society's communications.