The Fault In Our Stars Book Cover Redesign

These book covers were designed for my Junior Graphic Design 153 (Word and Image) course. The assignment was to design two alternative cover designs for a book you’ve read and enjoyed, but felt had a poorly designed cover that did not adequately convey the meaning or contents of the book. I chose John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, because although I loved the book in middle school, I always found issue in the dichotomy between the book’s playful, bright and cartoonish cover and its heart-wrenching story of adolescent cancer. For my redesigns, one cover features a galaxy within a pair of lungs, connecting the book’s title to the main character’s illness (thyroid cancer that the reader immediately learns has spread to her lungs, thus shortening the timeline of her already terminal prognosis). The second redesign features hand written text on ripped paper, alluding to the main character’s ‘diary-like’ storytelling and the first-person perspective the novel is written in. It additionally features two figures stargazing, as the two main characters do in the novel (also serving as an allusion to the title). The hand-drawn constellation that is featured alongside the title is of the ‘cancer’ constellation, giving the reader some idea of what they can expect within the pages of the book before they begin reading.