A front cover highlighting the research of a paper by Hua Deng, Rui Zhang, Chris Reynolds, Emiliano Bilotti and Ton Peijs came runner up among all selected front and back covers within the six journals of the Macromolecular Journals family of Wiley-VCH. In 2009, a total of 109 such covers were published. At the end of the year, nine of these covers were chosen as finalists after considering esthetics and innovation in graphically presented scientific research. In order to determine the 2009 Cover of the Year, the materials science community was then called in to vote for their favourite among the nine finalists at materialsviews.com.