Olly Moss designed the covers for the Harry Potter ebooks

I first ran across the work of designer Olly Moss several years ago, when he designed some super-simple alternate posters for iconic movies. He’s since worked on a whole bunch of great stuff, like Firewatch and posters for Studio Ghibli. Just the other day, while the kids and I were finding out what our Patronuses are,¹ I discovered that Moss not only designed the cover of the forthcoming ebook of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them but also did the covers for all seven of the Harry Potter ebooks.

Moss’ main technique, of combining two or more aspects of the story into a single image, is on full display in the Potter covers — the prison on a rock shaped like a dog for Azkaban, Voldemort as Harry’s scar for Hallows, and Dumbledore’s spell casting forming the pages of a textbook for Half-Blood Prince.

1. My Patronus is a badger. We also got sorted into our Hogwarts houses (Gryffindor for all three) and picked out wands (mine makes me sound like kind of an asshole). The sorting and wand choosing processes are basically personality tests. If you’ve never sat down with your kids and taken a personality test, I encourage you to do so. It was quite enlightening, not only seeing what they chose, but also seeing how they reacted to my choices and, especially, how I felt making those choices in front of them. I answered pretty honestly about who I think I am and what I would do in certain situations, but being watched so closely by two small humans who look to me to guide their choices in life was unsettling and caused me to second-guess some things. Like I said, enlightening.↩

• books
• design
• Harry Potter
• Olly Moss