Diary of a series redesign: the final cover designs – revealed!

In the final part of our series on book cover design & redesigning a book series, we reveal our final cover designs for The Hidden Series by Lian Tanner.

We’ve taken you through many stages of the process, from our initial need for new book covers, the direction of the cover design and covers meeting, finding a cover illustrator, assessing the cover roughs and now here we are, with finished covers! 

Are you peeking?

Are you scrolling to the bottom to see the covers without reading our carefully crafted words?

You are, aren’t you?

Fine, we’ll just talk to ourselves until we catch up to you then.

So… before we saw those roughs in our last post, we thought we knew what we wanted.

We thought it was the key-hole design to match The Keepers.

We were wrong.

What we didn’t know until we saw it, was that we wanted a distinctive, but much less obtrusive, series design that would give Arden’s beautiful illustration room to breathe.

We wanted this one:

This is why Josh is the designer and we merely have opinions about design.

The frame in this design not only showcased Arden’s work, but brilliantly complemented the book’s setting, and laid the foundation for a really interesting progression across the three books. Ice Breaker is well and truly frozen; Sunker’s Deep is watery; and Fetcher’s Song is, well, land-y. We could use the framing device differently for each, while still tying the books together with a unified series look.

The next thing to settle on was colour. The initial options evoked a rusty, steampunky feel that fitted the book well, but didn’t quite infuse the youthful energy and sense of light and adventure we were seeking.

True to form, both Josh and Arden took this feedback and ran with it.

And the final result is so beautiful. Better than we’d even dared hope.

Isn’t it SMASHING?!

Isn’t it DELCIOUS?

Isn’t it beautiful? Aren’t they lovely all together?

Here is the full cover of Ice Breaker – because the spine and back cover are gorgeous too.

Now we just have to wait for the books to get back from the printers so that we can roll around* in all of this gorgeousness.

What do you think of the final cover design?

We are so delighted, we’d like to say a very big thank you to Arden Beckwith and to Josh Durham. You guys are the cleverest and best.

But most delightful of all is the fact that Lian Tanner’s frabjously entertaining series The Hidden, will now be in the hands of readers again.

Petrel leaned on the rail, watching the ice cave and stamping her feet for warmth. The berg came closer. That’s when she saw him. Laid out on the ice like a dead fish, with a scattering of snow covering his face. A boy, where there should have been nothing but the memory of winter. A frozen boy.

* Never fear, we won’t actually roll on the actual books. But we might rock ‘n roll near them.