The cover to a $90 textbook.

What the hell. This is a real textbook. A real textbook that costs $90 dollars. Seriously, anime? This isn’t an isolated incident either; there’s also The Manga Guide to Calculus and The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology, among other choice selections for the discriminating Japanophile who cannot function unless absorbing information via Japanese comic art. Note that some are published by Manga University! Damn, I want a degree in Manga; I’d hang that shit on my office wall.

I cannot comprehend how that cover could lend any sort of legitimacy to the book itself; it’s not even a decent drawing. Look at the anatomy. Her leg seems to be growing out of her stomach, which is in equal vertical proportion to the head and those are some long-ass monkey arms. Don’t even try to pull the “personal style” card either. That’s clearly an attempt at a realistically proportioned person based on the scale and rendering detail.

As for overall design: why is the illustration in front of a blurred photo of (or CG generated) explosion? It’s way too disjointed and there’s no cohesive connection between fore and background. It reeks of lazy cop-out design; throw a sketch on top of a stock background rather than using a fully fleshed out illustration. The “thought bubble” that forms the title is done with a thick black stroke on ellipse primitives; another stylistic departure from the illustration. Drawing a matching thought bubble is. not. that. hard. Poor implementation of the dodge tool for the laptop screen “glow.” Failure of contrasting the yellow “5th Edition” text on top of other warm colors, killing legibility. The author names fall victim to the same fate; cool contrasting with cool (but at least it is strong enough to work).

I have my mac RSS screensaver set to display the feed from Slashdot and came across this interesting site. FontStruct lets you create your own font online, which can then be exported as a TrueType font for use on your computer. The UI is rather clever; with many scaling options and built-in ability to create hollows, bevels, and rounded edges. Early results can look rather blocky because of it’s grid-based geometry, but given enough time and effort, someone could make some very interesting fonts.