Welcome to another entry in the swirling, glitter-strewn vortex of questionable design choices. Today’s offender: Lessons from the Beastly University Faculty, a cover that attempts “whimsical fantasy” but lands somewhere between AI-generated fever dream and taxidermy-themed children’s nightmare.
Let’s start with the central figure: a sweet elderly woman who exudes wisdom, warmth, and… whatever digital art platform conjured her from the void. But wait—look closer. Surrounding Granny McWhimsy is a haunting posse of “animals,” or at least things that once aspired to be animals before the algorithm chewed them up and spat them out like rejected Muppets.
A llama that appears to be made of off-brand cotton candy. A parrot with eyes that know too much. An orange creature that might be a fox—or possibly a squirrel mid-shapeshift. And what’s going on with that ginger tabby cat who looks like it’s been through a paper shredder and reassembled by a committee of pigeons? This isn’t cozy fantasy. It’s a digital Noah’s Ark of nightmares, and the ark is definitely sinking.
Now, let’s address the typography, because of course there’s a font crisis. BEASTLY UNIVERSITY arrives in all caps, serifed and scholarly, setting us up for something vaguely Ivy League—but then Faculty swerves in like a rogue highlighter, scrawled in a fluorescent script that screams “I got lost on Canva and never came back.” And Lessons from the hovers limply at the top in pale lime, just barely visible, like the ghost of good design hovering above the wreckage.
The colour palette leans into a murky, overly saturated autumn-on-steroids vibe, as if the entire image was dunked in pumpkin spice and left to marinate. And despite all the chaos, the composition manages to feel weirdly flat. It’s a collage, not a cover—a sticker book of animal memes gone terribly wrong.
This cover may have aimed for charming, quirky, and approachable. What it delivered was uncanny, cluttered, and why-is-that-ferret-staring-at-me-like-that. Somewhere beneath this furry fiasco, there might be a fun story, but you’d have to claw your way past the AI smudge art and genre identity crisis to find it.
Final grade?
Welcome to Beastly University, where graphic design is on indefinite sabbatical and every animal’s face looks like it was rendered from memory.