Every once in a while, a book cover comes along that doesn’t just whisper “design fail” but screams it across a windswept beach at sunset. Enter: Maya – The Breaking Bonds of Emotions by Ajim N. Shaikh, a cover that boldly asks the question: “What if we used every font, alignment style, and stock image filter—at the same time?”
Let’s start with the background: two attractive stock models holding hands, walking barefoot along the beach. Romantic? Sure. Original? Absolutely not. This is the kind of photo you get when you search “romantic couple vacation stock royalty free 2008.” The lighting is soft, the ocean is dreamy, and the emotion is completely hollow—like the models were more invested in their next coconut smoothie than in each other. It’s less epic love story and more Instagram ad for linen resortwear.
But the real design carnage begins with the text explosion. We open with “Maya ❤️” at the top—because nothing screams literary gravitas like a floating, bright red heart emoji. And let’s not ignore the font choice here: basic, default serif, bolded like it’s trying to convince you it’s important, but failing miserably. And that heart? It’s the typographic equivalent of glitter glue—childish, loud, and impossible to ignore (no matter how much we want to).
Just below, we’re graced with the subtitle: “The breaking bonds of emotions.” Which is not only grammatically baffling, but emotionally confusing. Is it a breakup? A transformation? A sentence that was abandoned halfway through a thesaurus entry? We may never know. But what we do know is that the font treatment—an italicized sprawl awkwardly hugging the horizon line—is about as stable as a soap opera relationship arc.
Then, in a moment of pure typographic betrayal, we get “First Part” slapped on in a different font, different size, and different colour, shoved into the upper right like someone remembered at the last second this wasn’t even the whole story. The design strategy here appears to be “just toss it in and hope no one notices.” Spoiler: we noticed.
But the pièce de résistance? The author’s name in a giant baby-blue box, sitting proudly over the models’ legs like a nametag at a networking event. And just in case we weren’t aware this was self-published, we get the Author Ajim Publication logo stuck in the bottom left like a misplaced LinkedIn badge, clashing hard with the colour palette and contributing nothing except visual noise.
In short, this cover is a full-blown design identity crisis. It wants to be romantic, but it’s corporate. It wants to be emotional, but it’s hollow. It wants to be professional, but it’s giving group project energy. The only bond truly breaking here is the one between design theory and execution.
Maya didn’t just break the bonds of emotion—it shattered every rule of good cover design in the process.