What do you get when you cross a church newsletter, a motivational poster, and the layout instincts of a discount toothpaste box? You get The Secret Behind Standing Marriages — a cover that’s less about standing firm in your relationship and more about falling face-first into a Canva template with no escape plan.
Let’s start with the couple. Lovely people. Great smiles. But they’re posing like they’re being interviewed for a family-run insurance company, not featured on a book about “Biblical principles for stronger, healthier marriages.” They’ve been pasted onto a solid blue background so flat and textureless it feels like it’s from a bad school photo package labeled “Backdrop Option 3: Void.” There’s zero attempt to blend or stylize the portrait. It’s just photo, meet background — and hope no one notices the lighting mismatch or the floating effect.
And then the typography situation enters the chat.
The title — THE SECRET BEHIND STANDING MARRIAGES — is in all caps bold sans-serif, stacked in white like it’s shouting instructions during a fire drill. It takes up almost half the cover and has all the nuance of a spreadsheet heading. Beneath it, the subtitle is boxed into a yellow banner that looks like a misplaced ad for multivitamins:
Biblical Principles for Stronger, Healthier Marriages
Because nothing says spiritual guidance like a block of caution-tape text breaking up your layout.
But wait — it gets better. Enter the 2ND EDITION sticker, which looks like it was designed for a clearance tag at a dollar store. It’s floating off to the right, entirely detached from the rest of the visual flow. It’s not integrated, it’s not subtle — it’s a loud, circular interruption saying, “Hey! We revised it! Also we forgot about design continuity!”
And the author’s name? May Kawaala has been shoved to the bottom in all caps, white font, no styling, and about two pixels of breathing room. It’s not credited so much as squeezed in, like the last item on a to-do list that barely made the print deadline.
The entire cover gives the vibe of a self-published workbook found next to the bulletins at the back of a church foyer, probably sitting next to a stack of “7 Steps to Godly Leadership” and some very old mints. It wants to inspire trust, stability, and wisdom — but instead it delivers PowerPoint 2002 energy, smothered in boxed fonts and accidental graphic choices.
This isn’t just a design misstep. This is a full sermon-length example of how not to lay out a cover. The secret behind standing marriages might be in