Playbook for Navigating an Unwanted Divorce Book Cover

Judge this book by its cover.

Brief

A former co-worker contacted me to design the cover for his new book that helped navigate the process of dealing with divorce through the seven stages of grief.

He already had a cover designed, but wasn’t satisfied with how the concept came out.

I was able to develop a new concept and simpler design that gave his book the cover it deserved.

Some notes on the redesign:

The original concept tried to illustrate each individual stage from the book, but came out very busy. I wanted to simplify the concept by creating something that represented all seven stages as a whole.
The concept of the main graphic was to use a broken heart to represent divorce, and the football plays are placed overtop the break in the heart to represent mending the heart back together while sticking with the “playbook” theme.
I switched the title to a cleaner looking sans-serif font.
I felt “Unwanted Divorce” being the main theme should be more prominent than “Playbook” in the title, so I reflected that in the typography.
I changed the background color to a darker, bolder blue.