If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a diploma, a motivational poster, and an AI hallucination walked into a branding seminar, The New Illiteracy Crisis is your answer. This cover doesn’t whisper urgency—it yells it with flaming cities, glowing dirt paths, and parchment-related trauma all at once. It’s not just a design—it’s a visual TED Talk meltdown.
Let’s set the stage: a lone man stands dramatically in the center, his back to us, facing the metaphorical crossroads of modern education. To his left: a dystopian city glowing like a gold-plated NFT apocalypse. To his right: pastoral bliss, complete with trees, hay bales, and what looks like a peaceful stack of books just chilling in the grass like they’ve achieved enlightenment. A divine beam of light shines down on the path to rural rebirth, because of course it does.
And smack in the foreground, larger than life, is a massive, tattered diploma, lounging there like it owns the place. It’s torn, it’s stained, it’s doing the most. The sheer scale of it suggests the man just escaped a graduation ceremony hosted by giants. It’s also clearly pasted in as an afterthought—flat lighting, no perspective match, and shadows that feel like they were drawn in with a tired eyeliner pencil.
Zoom in on the left side and you’ll see diplomas literally erupting from the ground near the burning city, as if academic achievement has become a geological hazard. On the right, a stack of books and a tree stand solemnly, trying to stay relevant while the rest of the cover has a nervous breakdown.
The typography does exactly what you’d expect from a self-help-adjacent title: all-caps serif for the authority, lowercase subtitle for the soft disappointment. “Why Degrees Are No Longer Enough” feels like it was pulled directly from a LinkedIn influencer’s carousel post titled “7 Things You’re Doing Wrong With Your Life.” The title font is crisp, but it floats in this surreal landscape with no real anchoring. Just vibes.
Now, let’s talk tonal mismatch. This isn’t a visual metaphor—it’s a literal interpretation of a metaphor interpreted again by a motivational AI. It’s as if the designer took the phrase “Education is broken” and thought, you know what would really drive this home? A hellfire skyline and a diploma graveyard.
Verdict: The New Illiteracy Crisis is a full-blown crisis of visual messaging. It’s loud, chaotic, and overloaded with allegory—like a PowerPoint presentation given during an exorcism. The message may be serious, but this cover is a diploma in design overkill.
Someone please issue an honorary certificate in restraint.