Shatter me re-designed
Shatter me is one of my favourite book series of all time, but one thing has always bothered me about them. I don’t feel that the book covers reflect the books themselves. I therefore created new designs for the original trilogy.
I began this process by reading the books again and noting down any key themes, symbolism and quotes. I then used these notes to come up with some initial sketches that would better communicate the contents of the books.
The shatter me books are a fast paced dystopia series about a girl with the power to kill with a single touch. They follow her as she begins life outside of imprisonment and discovers that she might be able to change the world for people like her.
This is the illustration I created for book one. Below you can then see the design I was working on for the cover. This is a book set in a dystopian future and yet all previous covers use serif typefaces and very old looking imagery. I wanted to create something with a more neo noir reflection of the future, that is where my use of bold sans serif comes in to play.
Then we have the blurb. As these books are over old and already popular I felt that an impactful tagline would be of greater interest than a paragraph describing a plot they already know. The tagline crosses through the eyes to reflect the psychological thrill of the books themselves.
After the development of the general cover design I could begin creating illustrations for the other books in the series. The second book has strong themes of romance and the final book shows our main character falling in love with the villain I have therefore created illustrations to reflect this.
All the illustrations feature an unnatural number of human hands trying to grab our characters, this is to symbolise both the powers of our main character and the psychological torment on display throughout the books.
Here are the covers I produced for the trilogy.
In order to really see how my designs would work in the real world I also printed and bound all three books by hand.
