The “lightcone-eating” effect on the website is quite cool. The immediate obvious idea is to have that as a background and write the title inside the black area.
If one wanted to be cute you could even make the expansion vaguely skull-shaped; perhaps like so?
I imagine most disagreement comes from the first paragraph.
The problem with assuming that since the publisher is famous their design is necessarily good is that even huge companies make much worse baffling design decisions all the time, and in this case one can directly see the design and know that it’s not great – the weak outside-view evidence that prestigious companies usually do good work doesn’t move this very much.