Vanessa Mazic - "HEARTLESS"

Re-designing a wonderland retelling

This collection is part of my senior thesis project. It consisted of redesigning a book cover and creating promotional merchandise for the story.

Heartless is an origin story for the Queen of Hearts. This novel takes place in Wonderland yet delivers a unique twist to the land. I also wanted to put a visual twist on the design elements while working on this redesign. While the outward appearance of the land was enchanting in the novel, there was something dark and ominous that lurked beneath the surface. I focused on the dark whimsy and tried to present something that was an ominous yet intriguing representation of the story. The most authentic way to do this was to use a character and an event from the book in order to capture the essence of the story and present a peek into what was to happen in the novel.

Dust Jacket

Front and Back Cover

dark and whimsical design

Since I wanted to show the more ominous side of the story, I took inspiration from designs for Grimm’s Fairytale books. I brought in a dark color scheme and used rough illustrations with a limited, yet stark color scheme. The font I chose was rough and meant to resemble handwriting in order to match the heavy-handed strokes from the imagery. The raven seen throughout the designs is a character from the novel, I chose this character because of its role in the story as well as the symbolism of raven’s representing ill-omens in various forms of folklore. The bookmark also has the same double meaning, the raven feather matching both the bird on the cover as well as alluding to a reoccurring poem in the book. I wanted all elements to be very visual and illustration based to connect with the typical illustrative covers fairytale books typically have and relay more emotion through the use of a figure than abstract imagery.