These past couple weeks I have been working on a passion project. Anyone who knows me knows that I love to read.  I love cheesy YA fantasy books, so much so that when I was younger I wanted to be an author.

Being a visual communication specialist I decided to take some of that passion that I had for books and combine it with my passion for design and recreate a book cover. I read The Mortal Instruments books a few years ago and loved them. But I didn’t love the covers.

The original cover for the first book is pretty busy and has a guys chest on the front. Which is fine, but it’s’ not the type of cover that would typically catch my eye now. When I first got the gift, it was given to me, not something I picked out. I probably wouldn’t have grabbed it just by looking at the cover. So, I decided to redesign the covers to appeal to a little bit older audience – 18 to 25, young women (the book’s audience) in my own age range.

I knew I wanted a simple design with a lot less color. I’m at Barnes and Noble pretty often and I can tell you that the book covers that I always notice first are the white ones. There are so many colorful books on those shelves that the white ones look refreshing and different. I often pick up the white books first to read the description.

I also wanted a simple design. I’m not a fan of seeing people’s faces on book covers – I think it takes away from imagining characters, and I’ve just never like the look of it. I’ve probably read the City of Bones books twice through so I know a bit about the important parts of the books. So I took a few key elements from the books to create the covers.

I used much of the text from the actual book covers and just changed the design aspects. I used praise from the Shadowhunters.com website. I also recreated a bio (I don’t have my books with me and couldn’t find the author bio from the actual books) and used the photo from the real jacket design.

Enjoy the book jacket redesign of the first two books in The Mortal Instruments series. Let me know what you think in the comments below!