I bought it fully knowing it would be ugly, but we’re in the magazine’s early days. I want to help them get through this initial phase of cluelessness. So, if you’re one of the Lotus Eaters reading this, or even Carl Benjamin himself, I say this: I like you guys, I’ve been with you since GG, and this whole article will be full of exceedingly tough love. Know that it is love, though, even if I am harsh. I offer guidance and construction, not mere destruction. That’s not we do on our side.

Ok, enough ass-kissing, time to get harsh. You can tell by the garbage “artwork” the Lotus Eaters have sold before, and by how sloppy the trailer for Issue 3 is, that these Englishmen sadly have zero taste or skill in art. Hopefully, they eventually find someone who does, and gives them power over Islander.

Now, who the hell I am to say this? I am a competent individual who has been doing graphics, art and typography all my life. I am the son of two book binders. I grew up with this stuff in my hands and in my blood. I have a deep appreciation for the art of crafting great items of literature.

The cover is beyond unworthy 🔗

First of all, it is obvious digital AI slop, with a little guy drawn in. The artist might’ve had to draw the guy by hand or at least retouch him, because he’s the most coherent and detailed element of the scene, even though, less coherently, he has managed not to leave a single footprint in the snow! Impressive!

It is very out of character to involve any AI slop here what so ever. Carl is the creator of The Metaphysics of Slop, but then he turns around and plasters Fiverr-level AI slop on the cover of his magazine? Sad.

In the art world it is known, Khaleesi, what a terrible crutch it is to juxtapose a small guy with a massive object. It is a cope junior artists use when trying to replace the difficult work of creating a good composition and story, by assulting your senses with sheer scale. Wow, look it’s so epic! If you had commissioned a great illustrator to do art for the cover of the magazine, he would not have made that, unless he’s absolutely phoning it in.

In this clip (which I recommend you muster the attention span to watch in full before reading on) legendary illustrator Feng Zhu shows a good student portfolio, and then demonstrates how easy it is to make the “epic” slop he is tired of seeing. It’s almost feels uncanny how accurately he describes the cover of Islander 3. Some big central shape, “epic” 45 degree sunset lighting coming from behind the big shape, bright background, dark foreground, the big shape is a ruin because that’s way easier than making it pristine, and a little guy to add “story” and scale. On the Islander cover they even made the little guy into the traveling stick merchant! The traveling stick merchant is an inside joke in the art world, when the little guy you put in for scale and “story” has a stick. It is so far beyond generic that it’s a joke.

The logo on the cover doesn’t fit the artwork or theme, and is mismatched with the font on the spine, though that may be intentional. Having a big © after ISLANDER was a big mistake. The © grabs more attention than your traveling stick merchant! And you even wrote your website URL on the front page?? This stuff is back cover material, not front cover material. And of course, in typical amateur “zine” fashion, they didn’t actually utilize the back cover at all. It’s blank. At least put a blurb about who you are and what the goal of the magazine is there.

All-in-all the general style of the cover doesn’t fit the content, nor does it properly represent the quality of the written work within. This is extra sad, because as far as I’ve red, it is pretty good. It’s decidedly not AI slop, and doesn’t deserve to be represented by AI slop.

I will say, though, that the print quality seems pretty good, and the paper is alright! Looking at it with my father, we were concerned that the plastic laminate used to make the front cover matte might eventually peel off, but can’t say for certain.

The graphical elements 🔗

In the trailer Mr. Benjamin says “it is rendered in a beautiful revivalist medievalist style”, which is mostly true. It is medievalist and revivalist, and sometimes it even is beautiful. What they seem to be chasing is the style of illuminated manuscripts… sometimes. Most of the time they seem to be going for something post-Gutenberg, but we’ll get into this.

In this little bit of Speculum Historiale by Vincent of Beauvais, from the late 1400s, we see an initial / drop cap, rubrics, which is a section of red text, and plenty of beautiful and colorful decorative marginalia.

Illumination is an artform that evolved over many hundreds of years. It is an aristocratic and expensive process. Back before the printing press, this work was done by hand, by experts, and only the richest in society had access to books, let alone the ability to even read them. This is a grand and high tradition that we are completely detached from. Not just because because this required skill and method which is not passed down to anyone in today’s society (In fact we seem to be deliberately destroying it), but also because the tools used for creating these items of literature have long been replaced. Therefore it is very easy to get the fundamentals of this work wrong, which they do. I don’t blame Mr. Benjamin, the Lotus Eaters, nor the editor R. C. J. Cranstoun for this, of course. It is not their fault that our civilization and art is completely disconnected from the tradition that built us. They’re at least doing great work to mend this divide to the past!

You will notice from the examples above that these illuminated manuscripts are very colorful. Colors, especially blue, is a kingly and aristocratic trait. Something which initially fell more by the wayside after the introduction of the printing press. The general style of this survived, but usually not in color. It is much cheaper and easier to print only black ink. That seems to be the style they’ve gone for in Islander. Except when they didn’t.

Sometimes they use colorful marginalia. That’s fine in and of itself, but look at this page. It is so clearly a product of moving around PNGs and SVGs in an unbounded computer program. When illuminating, the text is written first, with space reserved for ornamentation. This ornamentation will then be painted at the scale it is going on to the page, so the detail levels of the different elements will match. Here, however, we see some autumn leaf marginalia with big thick outlines which was clearly intended for a way smaller scale, a scaled down illustration of a child in the air which has a frame jarringly skinnier than the outline of the marginalia, and an initial that is suddenly extremely detailed because it is a massively downscaled image, with no frame. This inconsistency, could all be remedied by some handy work and judicious layouting. At least pass the leaves through an AI to give it more detail. Or drop them completely, and keep only the initial or main illustration, because it’s distracting from the main point, and doesn’t match the theme of winter what so ever.

What is very consistent though, is that the scans they got all the marginalia elements from are much too low resolution, and are marred by pixelation or terrible automatic vectorization artifacts attempting and failing to hide pixelation.

This is the one place where AI most definitely should’ve been employed, but wasn’t. I know you probably can’t afford to hire artists to paint original high-resolution marginalia for you. Even though that would be nice, because you could have it fit the theme of winter for the magazine, instead of all these random summery and flowery royalty free / public domain scans off the internet. So long as this is your only option, however, please run it through some AI upscaling before you try to convert it to vector graphics. These vectorization artifacts are awful.

The typography and layout 🔗

I will not be complaining about the font. Obviously they are not going to, nor should they, render the entire book in some historically accurate blackletter font. That would be awful and unreadable. Basic errors of visual hierarchy and grouping such as this, I will complain about, however.

On the left, you see the original, on the right is my very quick and rough edit. Notice how in the original there’s more space between the lines of the paragraph, than there is to the next title. This muddles the relationship and hierarchy between the different elements. Control your spacing, people!

On the note about space, looking at the style they’re trying to revive, you will notice that a key aspect of the aristocratic book is heaps and heaps of margin. This makes the text more comfortable to read, gives space for ornamentation, and also demonstrates a disregard for the cost of paper. They don’t need to absolutely maximize how much they can fit on a page, covering the entire page with text. They are above that. Compare that to this spread from Islander Issue 3. (Blurred, because you should’ve bought it, if you wanted to read it)

It’s practically marginless! You can barely even hold this without your thumbs covering the content. This is the column layout of most of the pages. This will change at random, however, so sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they put more margin between the columns than beside them:

Margins around the illustrations and ornamentation vary just as much. Sometimes it is comfortably generous, sometimes it causes blatantly amateurish separations, and sometimes it is unforgivably tight.

Despite all this, I do like the magazine. The few articles I’ve red so far are quite good, and some pages are very beautiful. Aside from those specific pages, however, it is typographically chaotic and inconsistent. You sorely need to find someone with better eyes to help with the next issue, or give your current eyes more time to polish it. And with that, I wish you the best of luck, and are you not a Lotus Eater, I hope this at least was entertaining or educational for you.