We present improved deformation energy to enhance the visual quality of a shape deformation technique, where we preserve the local structure of an input planar shape. The deformation energy, in general, consists of several constraints such as Laplacian coordinate constraint to preserve the quality of deformed silhouette edges, mean value coordinates and edge length constraints to preserve the quality of deformed internal shape, and user-specified position constraints to control the shape deformation. When the positions of user-specified vertices change, shape deformation techniques compute the positions of the other vertices by means of nonlinear least squares optimization to minimize the deformation energy. When a user-specified vertex changes its position rapidly, it is frequently observed that the visual quality of the deformed shape decrease rapidly, which is mainly caused by unnecessary enlargement of the Laplacian vectors and unnecessary change of the edge directions along the boundary of the shape. In this paper, we propose improved deformation energy by prohibiting the Laplacian and edge length constraints from changing unnecessarily. The proposed deformation energy incorporated with well-known optimization technique can enhance the visual quality of shape deformation along the silhouette and within the interior of the planar shape while sacrificing only a little execution time.