The second entry in Jeremy Clift’s Sci-Fi Galaxy Series crash lands with all the grace of a deflating weather balloon. Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse sounds like a title promising interstellar stakes, alien civilizations, or maybe even some high-octane quantum vault heist. Instead, we get… a daisy. A daisy that’s been very rudely hijacked by a tiny wormhole in its pollen pouch.
Let’s talk focal point. The cover is dominated by a stock photo of a yellow flower, presumably chosen because it’s vaguely star-shaped if you squint hard enough while spinning. The center of the daisy has been infiltrated by a suspiciously low-res cosmic swirl, like someone in the design department screamed “SCI-FI” at Canva’s stock image library and just slapped on the first black hole PNG that looked vaguely ominous. Is this the space vault? The seed? The eclipse? We may never know. But it’s definitely not the design solution we were looking for.
Now let’s address the title treatment, which boldly insists on center alignment but offers zero spatial awareness. “SPACE VAULT” is spaced with the aggressive self-confidence of a teenager discovering caps lock for the first time, while “THE SEED ECLIPSE” sits underneath in a tragic italicized whimper, like a footnote hoping no one makes eye contact.
Then there’s the typography—clean sans-serif fonts without any styling to match the genre or tone. It’s giving “corporate PowerPoint slide” more than “galactic peril.” The yellow-on-yellow palette makes the whole thing feel like a motivational poster found in the breakroom of a failing tech startup, not the cover of a sci-fi adventure.
And can we talk about Jeremy Clift’s name? Centered awkwardly in the flower petals like a botanist signing off on pollination, the author’s name is presented as though it, too, was unsure of the genre. It’s all so bright, so cheerful—less 2001: A Space Odyssey and more 2001: A Florist’s Display Window.
This cover doesn’t just fail to communicate the genre—it launches it into a sun and watches it burn. If Space Vault is about the epic collision of science and nature, the cover missed the mark by several parsecs and landed squarely in a Whole Foods floral arrangement.
File this one under: Daisy Ridiculous.