Winner of Adrian Van Sinderen Poster Prize announced

Kyungjae Daniel Lee ’20 of Benjamin Franklin College has been selected as the winning designer in this year’s poster competition for the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes.

Lee’s poster will be used to advertise this year’s competition. The judging committee commended its “vigorous and evocative blackletter typography, which will draw attention from a distance.”

Honorable mention was awarded to Deborah Monti ’19 of Jonathan Edwards College. Monti’s poster is honored for its “legibility and its use of type and image to create a compelling sense of depth.” Julia Ma ’19 of Jonathan Edwards College and Tommy Huang ’19 of Jonathan Edwards College were also awarded an honorable mention for their “appealing use of letterpress typography.” The committee appreciated the designers’ sense of humor as they improvised substitutions for missing characters in their wood-type font, turning being “out of sorts” to graphic advantage.

For more than half a century, student bibliophiles have been receiving prizes for the quality of their book collections, thanks to the generosity of alumnus Adrian Van Sinderen (Class of 1910). In 1957 Van Sinderen established two prizes, awarding $1,000 to seniors and $700 to sophomores, in order to encourage undergraduates to collect books, build up libraries of their own, and read for pleasure and learning. In 2002 a poster competition was established; a $500 prize is awarded to the winning designer.