Ah, Thanksgiving — a time for family, food, and apparently, graphic design breakdowns served with a side of Clip Art Casserole. The Turkey Who Came to Dinner by EmKay Connor promises festive fun, but what it delivers is a surreal, vector-based fever dream where everyone has dead eyes and questionable anatomy. This isn’t dinner — it’s a design emergency wrapped in autumnal confusion.
Let’s carve into it.
The first thing that assaults your eyeballs is the mismatch of fonts that look like they RSVP’d to entirely different genre parties. “Turkey” and “Dinner” are styled in a curly green script, like a rustic wedding invite trying to be whimsical. Meanwhile, “who came to” is sandwiched awkwardly in blocky, pale green font, floating with all the confidence of a name tag at a corporate mixer. It’s as if the title got caught between chic Hallmark romance and “Oops, all WordArt.”
Then we come to the illustration, and I use that term generously. Our male lead sits at the table with a slice of pie and the emotional depth of a mannequin. His shirt blends into the table like he’s slowly merging with the Thanksgiving cloth. The female character floats behind him, carrying a turkey with the proud intensity of a game show prize girl, and a hairstyle that suggests either 1963 or a large nesting bird. Her head is so disproportionately large she might tip forward mid-dialogue.
The turkey she’s holding? Rigid. Brown. Garnished with sadness. It doesn’t look cooked so much as 3D-printed from a discount rotisserie model. And don’t miss the baffling still-life of produce in the bottom corner — a pile of pumpkins, apples, and grapes rendered in a style that says “elementary school worksheet clipart” while contributing absolutely nothing to the scene.
The window in the background tries to tell us it’s fall, but those floating leaves are so static, they look glued to the glass. The whole composition is painfully flat, with a color palette that says “sure, orange exists” and a lighting scheme that doesn’t.
And the layout? The entire lower third of the cover has been swallowed by a tan void where the title and author name wrestle for dominance. EmKay Connor is set in dramatic all-caps serif, like she’s about to launch a courtroom thriller — completely at odds with the cartoonish chaos above.
All in all, The Turkey Who Came to Dinner looks like it was designed in Microsoft Publisher by someone three days into a pumpkin spice high. It’s confused, clunky, and completely incapable of choosing a visual identity. Is it cozy? Is it romantic? Is it terrifying? No one knows.
If this turkey came to dinner, the guests would quietly excuse themselves, the pie would cry, and the table would file a restraining order. This cover didn’t just burn the stuffing — it deep-fried the design rulebook and served it cold.