The Best of Denver 2026 Is Here!

The Best of Denver 2026 is now hitting the streets…and the web. It’s full of hundreds of discoveries and new facets of old favorites — places to eat, sleep, drink and tell your friends to take a hike. This is our 43rd annual celebration of the city and, as always, we asked readers their opinions in a separate Readers’ Choice poll that resulted in 500,000 votes choosing 291 additional winners.

We’re always looking for new things to reveal in the Best of Denver. But this time we repeated a concept introduced last year: Working with the Visual Arts department at the College of Arts & Media at the University of Colorado Denver — a school in the heart of the city that the Best of Denver celebrates — we designed a student contest to create the Best of Denver cover art. We had only two rules: the entry had to somehow express the city, and AI could not be used in its production (we’re celebrating originality and excellence, after all). Oh, and if the illustration happened to contain a cow, all the better. (Quick history: Back in the early ’80s when the Best of Denver concept was born, city boosters were very concerned that Denver was still considered a cowtown, “Omaha with mountains.” In true alt-weekly fashion, we decided it was our mission to mock these mooovers and shakers, and a cow — or bull, steer or something in between — became a fixture of the Best of Denver cover art.)

The results of that initial contest were so spectacular that we devoted not just the cover, but our section openers (and our art budget) to student winners. So this year, we again partnered with the College of Arts & Media on a Best of Denver contest, and the results were just as spectacular. In fact, this year’s cover artist, Hattie Boyd, was a finalist last year, when her work graced the 2025 Marijuana & More section.

Boyd’s father was in the military, and the family moved around a lot before settling in Colorado Springs, where she grew up. After initially enrolling at Colorado State University, she transferred to the University of Colorado Denver for its 3-D graphics and animation program. “I knew I wanted to do art,” she says.

And she’s definitely doing that: Boyd was in her first year at the school when she snagged that finalist spot in the 2025 Best of Denver contest. “I saw a flier,” she recalls, “and it was fun to see what I could create. I looked at old covers and took inspiration from them; they’re all so great.”

This year, she took inspiration from J.C. Leyendecker, the artist who created more than 322 pieces for the Saturday Evening Post, and decided to play off the idea of a cow jumping over the moon. “It’s overused,” she admits, “but I liked the idea so much.” She liked playing up the urban aspect, too, she says, since so much of the art you see in Denver is “always about the mountains.”

She took more time with this piece, she says, and it shows; the work is so detailed that some people wonder if she used AI. “There are a lot of challenges,” she acknowledges. “You want to make something perfect, but you don’t want to have people accusing you of using generative AI. The fact that I know I made it is good enough for me. AI can never replicate what people do.”

For proof, she points to Leyendecker’s work, and how all the brushstrokes are evident when you look. “You know it’s made by humans,” she points out.

Boyd spends a lot of time looking at art. “Even though it’s going to be my job, I do it in my free time,” she says. She likes looking at the murals around town and the shows at the Emmanuel Gallery. When you go to school at Auraria, there’s always plenty to see. “I really like the campus because it’s combined with different campuses, but you can also walk around downtown,” she notes. “There are a lot of opportunities.”

And that includes the opportunity to take public transit…to home in Broomfield, to visit her family in Colorado Springs. “Even when I’m on the bus, traffic is always so terrible, which is why I included this,” she says. “It’s a big part of Denver.”

So are talented creatives like Hattie Boyd, and the other University of Colorado students whose work is showcased in the Best of Denver 2026.