Goodreads Redesign
Last Updated on August 23, 2026 by Editorial Team
A super clean redesign of Goodreads’ book page and review form. Created and shared by Dovile. To be honest, it looks much better than the actual design of Goodreads.
Look closely at the layout and you can see exactly why this redesign holds together so well. It keeps the bones of the real Goodreads book page, cover image on the left, title and rating block beside it, friend reviews stacked below, sidebar recommendations on the right, but tightens every bit of spacing and typography until the whole thing reads calmer and more editorial.
The blue book cover for The Lean Startup pops against a mostly white background, and that restraint is the real lesson here.
Nothing fights for attention. The star ratings, the metadata line about pages and publish date, the small orange links for “Ratings details” and reviews count all sit at a consistent visual weight so your eye can scan the page top to bottom without snagging.
This kind of mockup is genuinely useful if you’re studying book discovery platforms, building a reading app, or pitching a redesign concept for an existing product. Product designers working on content-heavy UI, anything with reviews, ratings, and social proof stacked together, can lift the pattern directly: a clear content hierarchy up top, social validation in the middle, and monetizable or recommendation-driven modules pushed to the sidebar.
It’s also a solid reference for anyone designing a book club app, a library catalog interface, or an e-commerce product page that needs to blend editorial content with user reviews.
What Makes The Hierarchy Work
The friends’ reviews section is worth studying on its own.
Each reviewer gets an avatar, a name, a star rating, and a timestamp, all aligned on a single baseline so the list feels like a clean table even though it’s really a stream of separate posts.
The nested comment under Johnny Spencer’s review shows how to handle threaded replies without breaking that rhythm; it’s indented just enough to signal hierarchy while staying visually quiet.
If you’re adapting this for your own project, pay attention to how much negative space sits between each review. That breathing room is doing a lot of work to keep a long list of reviews from feeling cluttered.
The sidebar treatment is another piece worth borrowing. “Readers also enjoyed” and “Books by Eric Ries” use small book cover thumbnails in tight grids, which is a much more scannable pattern than long text lists for recommendation modules.
If you open this file in your own editor, try swapping in your own cover art and review data to see how the grid holds up with different aspect ratios and colors, since that’s the real test of whether a layout like this is flexible enough for production use.
Pair this redesign with a simple sans-serif typeface, muted grays for secondary text, and a single accent color for links and ratings, and you’ll get close to the same understated, trustworthy feel that makes this concept an improvement over a lot of cluttered review pages still in the wild today.
