At first glance, A Menagerie of Dragons looks like the kind of charming fantasy you’d gift your precocious niece along with a crystal necklace and a hardcover journal. But blink twice—and suddenly you’re trapped in a golden tornado of clip art, confusion, and cut-and-paste calamity.
Let’s start with the sheer volume of gold. There’s gilded trim. Gilded dragons. Gilded filigree. Gilded fonts. Gilded skies. Gilded plot devices, probably. Everything is positively sloshing with gold like Midas sneezed on the entire PSD file. If this were any shinier, you’d need SPF 50 just to read the title.
And speaking of the title—what is going on there? “A MENAGERIE OF DRAGONS” is set in a font so wildly whimsical it could’ve been forged by calligraphic fae under duress. Every letter is either curling like it’s posing for a botanical illustration or stretching out like it’s being slowly devoured by the letter next to it. It’s not so much a title as it is a decorative puzzle.
Zoom out and you’ll find a protagonist who appears to have been digitally snipped from a 1950s classroom poster, holding a book and gesturing vaguely at a dragon as if she’s either giving a TED Talk or trying to shoo it off her shoulder. She floats serenely in the foreground, untouched by the lighting, the world, or logic itself. The rest of the scene—the hall of arches, the ornate detailing, the dragons flying around like magical gnats—is a chaotic ballet of mismatched depth and competing elements.
And what is that in the background? A stylized Taj Mahal? A fantasy museum? A celestial map? And wait—is that a road? Or a train track? Or a power line diagram masquerading as floor tile? The architecture and line work raise more questions than the dragons do, and that’s saying something.
Oh, and let’s not forget the random “1” floating at the top of the cover like a lost chapter number or a forgotten button from a UI design kit. Is it part of the title? A countdown? The rating this design deserves? Unclear.
This cover tries to be magical and charming but ends up looking like a stationery aisle hallucination. It’s the visual equivalent of drinking glitter glue while flipping through a fantasy coloring book on fast-forward.
Final diagnosis: A Menagerie of Dragons? More like A Miscellany of Design Decisions—and none of them got along.