Nothing says timeless design quite like three completely unrelated clocks photoshopped onto a background the color of burnt peanut butter and despair.
Welcome to The Grandfather Clock Owner’s Repair Manual, a cover that boldly asks the question:
“What if we designed this like a Craigslist ad for old furniture no one wants?”
Let’s begin with the obvious — the clock lineup. These three grandfather clocks are standing like they’re posing for a lineup in a murder mystery where the victim is good design. They’re poorly cropped, floating in the void, and each one looks like it was taken with a different decade’s digital camera. One is lit like a department store catalog, one is deep in witness protection, and the third looks like it barely survived a JPEG compression accident.
Behind them, we’re treated to a murky background of gear graphics so faint, so utterly uninterested in being seen, they might as well not exist. And let’s talk color: we’ve got brown on different brown. A full spectrum of oatmeal. It’s like someone used a coffee-stained paper towel as a color reference.
Now, the typography. “The Grandfather Clock Owner’s Repair Manual” sits at the top like a shrug. It’s default sans-serif, unevenly spaced, and styled with the aesthetic intensity of a DMV pamphlet. Below that, the thrilling subtitle “Step by Step / No Prior Experience Required” floats in generic black font like a last-minute thought scrawled on a Post-it. And then there’s the author name — white text on a solid brown box, awkwardly aligned like a price tag on a thrift store bookshelf. Graphic design truly took the day off.
This cover is less “professional manual” and more “PowerPoint slide made under duress.” It has the energy of a project slapped together at 11:59 PM before the print-on-demand deadline. The clocks are floating, the text is flailing, and the entire thing radiates the aura of a time-traveling brochure from 2004.
And here’s the irony: this book is supposed to teach you how to fix clocks — yet the cover itself is frozen in a tragic, outdated moment. No amount of gear grease or pendulum polish can fix this level of design paralysis.