Margaret Atwood Book Covers
Book Cover Lettering Illustration
How do you visualize a secret network without being literal? For this self-initiated editorial project, I redesigned the covers for Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments. My objective was to capture the themes of systemic oppression and female solidarity using typography and minimalist illustration as the central narrative tools.
I explored a highly structural, monoline lettering composition. The challenge was to illustrate connection without defaulting to a cursive or script style. Instead, I crafted bespoke, sans-serif letterforms where the extensions act as tethers, physically linking the words together into a compact, solid block.
To create a strong visual contrast, this large, connected lettering towers over the smaller figures at the bottom: anonymous, faceless silhouettes. These figures intentionally lack individual characteristics to represent the collective resilience of all the women forced into these roles, rather than focusing on a single protagonist.
The final designs—set against the striking, iconic red and purple palettes associated with the novels—result in a powerful, modern editorial presence. By embedding the narrative's core meaning directly into the architecture of the lettering and the purposeful anonymity of the illustrations, this project highlights my ability to deliver conceptually rigorous solutions for culturally significant properties.
