Imagine grabbing a stack of clip art from a ’90s educational CD-ROM, dumping it onto a beach, and calling it a mystery novel. Congratulations, you’ve just recreated the cover of Booking a Killer Wave. If this cover were a surfing competition, it wiped out before it even hit the water.
Let’s start with the obvious: what exactly is the tone here? Is this a cozy beach mystery? A cartoonish kids’ adventure? A trophy-themed surf romance? We may never know, because this design throws genre coherence out with the tide.
The central “wave”—the only element with any semi-realistic rendering—is hosting a lonely surfer who appears to have wandered in from a more serious book. Behind him: a cluster of surfboards straight from a hotel welcome brochure, flanked by carnival-colored umbrellas that would make a clown blush. One umbrella is actually leaning like it just gave up halfway through the layout process.
Then there’s the trophy, dead center, casting a shadow while everything else on the page pretends the sun doesn’t exist. Is the trophy the murder weapon? A suspect? Or just a poorly pasted vector image that no one had the heart to delete?
And let’s not forget the surfboard, which features a painted tiki face that’s giving haunted sentient artifact vibes. It stares at us like it knows things—bad things. Is the killer… the surfboard?
Now to the typography crime scene. “Booking a Killer Wave” is scrawled across the page in a red brush script that’s more rom-com than whodunit, and “A Myrtle Beach Mystery” floats nearby in a completely different font, looking lost and emotionally distant. Did the fonts even meet before being paired together? Was there a design chaperone?
The cherry on this pixelated sundae is the color palette: blinding aqua skies, neon red text, and the kind of yellow that screams “danger, bad kerning ahead.”
This isn’t a book cover—it’s a visual hostage situation.
In the end, Booking a Killer Wave promises a fun mystery but delivers a genre identity crisis on a beach towel. It’s a cover that doesn’t just miss the wave—it belly flops into the uncanny ocean of design confusion.