[CleanCoder]

> Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice.

This is far from "clearest way possible", it's not even in the middle. This choice impedes communication which makes is less useful, by your definition.

> But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

I find it difficult to believe that the author's aim was to share a story in such way that's unnecessarily harder to consume, by a large portion of people otherwise interested in their thoughts.

[sainez]

Anti-design[1] is a movement which rejects the over-sanitation of design. Type a random query into Google and click through the first few links. What will you see? An endless sea of black-on-white, sans-serif, grids of text.

Anti-design is effective in making things memorable and engaging. When I attended Davis, I first thought the Social Sciences Building[2] was a bit of an eye sore. It was intentionally designed to be challenging. Now it is one of my most vivid memories of the campus.

1: https://99designs.com/blog/design-history-movements/anti-des...

2: https://localwiki.org/davis/Social_Sciences_and_Humanities_B...

[Misdicorl]

You find it difficult to believe? The person clearly worked hard to achieve this aesthetic. The font even sort of matches the illustrations. This is clearly intentional from my pov. This aesthetic was more important to the author than ease of reading/consumption.