Buckle up, space travelers, because we are crash-landing into the graphic design black hole that is Those Alien Skies. This cover didn’t just boldly go where no designer should ever go—it hit the warp drive on every cliché, then slammed into an asteroid of bad decisions.
Let’s start with our intergalactic menace: the robot. Or is it a knockoff Iron Man built from leftover toaster parts? Whatever it is, it appears to be cobbled together in a rogue AI’s fever dream, dipped in chrome, and lit with the subtlety of a flashlight taped to a ceiling fan. The lighting on this mechanical marvel doesn’t match a single other object on the cover, creating a disjointed “cut and paste from three separate planets” effect. The left arm seems to defy basic anatomy—and physics. Not alien enough to be creepy, not human enough to be cool—just enough to make your graphic design sense beg for mercy.
And speaking of mercy, can someone call the Font Police? The title is stacked in a way that would make a Scrabble board look organized. “THOSE” and “SKIES” are in bold white, screaming at us like a bad sci-fi convention banner, while “ALIEN” is jammed in the middle in eye-searing orange like it’s trying to photobomb its own title. The color combo? It’s giving gas station sci-fi thriller from 2002. The subtitle—“A Collection of Galactic Encounters of the Mysterious Kind”—is buried in orange at the bottom, where it competes valiantly with a glowing horizon and loses badly.
Oh, and the background? We’ve got a blue planet that looks like it was lifted from a Windows 95 screensaver and a flying saucer so blurry and basic it could’ve been borrowed from Clip Art 1.0. There’s fog. There’s shadow. There’s atmosphere. But none of it matches. It’s like someone mashed together three separate moods in Photoshop and hoped for the best.
This cover wants to be cinematic. It wants to be moody. What it ends up being is a desktop wallpaper for your conspiracy theory uncle.
Those Alien Skies promises mystery and wonder—but the real mystery is how this design escaped Earth’s orbit without a design intervention.