If Edinburgh ever needed a tourism campaign to actively dissuade visitors, this cover just volunteered as tribute. T. R. Dray’s Wasted is a gritty thriller about trash and corruption, but the real crime here is against graphic design.
First, let’s address the scene—or more accurately, the pixelated fever dream that someone decided to call a book cover. We’ve got a garbage truck mid-dump, a lonely white van looking like it just reverse-parked into a noir novel, and a skyline so dimly lit it could be a rejected still from The Batman—the one where Gotham gave up and outsourced its ambiance to a flashlight and a fog machine.
The background is possibly Edinburgh, or maybe it’s a haunted oil painting of it. The ominous silhouette effect is trying its best, but the lighting on the foreground elements says “AI collage experiment that failed the Turing test.” The garbage pile appears digitally smeared into the road with all the finesse of a toddler finger-painting with asphalt. Meanwhile, the van looks as if it was dragged and dropped with zero attempts at perspective, blending, or giving it a shadow that actually respects the laws of physics.
Then we come to the typography, which should be hauled in for questioning. The title WASTED is centered like a scolding, set in a font that’s trying to be bold and gritty but lands somewhere between “2023 internship resume header” and “poster for an anti-littering campaign.” Below it, we get red tagline text that’s desperately trying to sound cinematic. Unfortunately, it’s a breathless paragraph with the line breaks of a panicked telegram. By the time we get to “A Rosa Underwood Dossier,” we’re not sure if we’re in a spy novel, a podcast, or a LinkedIn post.
The color scheme is another suspect. Muted blues and blacks compete with that blaring emergency red font—like crime scene tape slapped across a foggy Thomas Kinkade painting. It’s bleak, unreadable from a distance, and honestly just plain sad.
In the end, this cover gives off major energy of a designer told to “make it dark and serious,” with a budget of $0 and 45 minutes before lunch. It’s supposed to tease a conspiracy thriller, but instead it looks like Edinburgh’s waste management department dropped their annual report in a blender and called it storytelling.
This isn’t a Rosa Underwood Dossier. This is a design file that should’ve been marked confidential and buried deep in the recycling bin.