Former HOW art director Amy Hawk and two of her fellow instructors at the University of Akron (John Morrison and Dave Szalay) recently gave their Type 3 classes an assignment that Amy knows all too well: design a cover for HOW's Self-Promotion Issue.

Amy forwarded all the cover designs here to HOW HQ and asked us to choose the three strongest designs. Here's the work that caught our eyes:

First place, by Ashley Engelhardt: We liked the scribbled HOW logo, the great contrast, the textured background and the concept itself, which references the Xeroxed personal ads with the little tear-off tabs that are ubiquitous on college campuses.




Second place, by Melissa Olson: Though we were a bit befuddled by the weird family photo, we liked the cover-as-corkboard concept and thought the masking-tape logo treatment was clever.




Third place, by Rachel Von Hendrix: The typographic illustration, though not an original idea, was well-done, and we liked the color scheme.




And we selected a runner up, too, by Slyeri Lee. We didn't get it, but we thought the image was cool.