Initially I found these new PG covers ugly* as well. Digging into the background is however quite interesting.
Before getting to that: IMHO the PG implementation screwed up the font. Not to go into rant overdrive, but one of basic visual rules for me is *no font stretching*, especially horizontally. Things start to look off, amateurish, quickly. Sure, PG has long titles and subtitles, but this makes a border case edgy. Anyway.
The design came from some library people who researched automatic cover generation. The PG one uses the title letters, arranges them into a square. and converts them into PET ASCII symbols. So the gibberish is really the title, quite neat actually.
The PET symbols were found on the Commodore 64's keyboard. IIRC they were mostly used in quirky BASIC games. The ones I recall when a child were... dubious :P The colors are derived using some method. Indeed not with the best results, but hey
They made a number of designs, shown on their blog page:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/09/03...e-ebook-covers
At the bottom there's also a link to the Print 10 book/project.
I'm still considering added this cover generator to calibre with some tweaks, mostly to check out the code. Doubt it will be popular
* some prepend an f there.