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Star Trek: Lower Decks
The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks
Get a behind-the-scenes look at the art of this fan-favorite series! Climb aboard the U.S.S. Cerritos with its crew in this special look at the art of the critically acclaimed animated series. With special sections focusing on characters, ships, backgrounds, and scenery, you’ll know the lower decks better than the crew! Also included will be interviews with members of the art team, who provide special insights into the making of the series and the art process.
344 pages, Hardcover
First published May 5, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 6, 2026
The Art of 'Star Trek: Lower Decks'
I love books like this, because it is so easy to focus on the drama of the production to the exclusion of the hours of work that has gone into making the space feel real as well. This goes much more so for an animated series. Nothing is shown by accident and everything has a meaning. In this book, ably compiled by Trevino, we get to see the decisions behind the set design and, through comparing rough drafts and discarded design choices, appreciate the final product that little bit more.
I love books like this, because it is so easy to focus on the drama of the production to the exclusion of the hours of work that has gone into making the space feel real as well. This goes much more so for an animated series. Nothing is shown by accident and everything has a meaning. In this book, ably compiled by Trevino, we get to see the decisions behind the set design and, through comparing rough drafts and discarded design choices, appreciate the final product that little bit more.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Joke Holds Because the World Holds
How “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” reveals the visual discipline, structural care, and hidden labor that make comic looseness look effortless
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 1st, 2026
Most franchise art books treat access as a sufficient argument. Open the vault, fan out the sketches, let the reader feel specially admitted, and call it insight. “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” offers that pleasure, certainly, but it wants something harder to sell and easier to underestimate. It is not content to let you peek behind the scenes of a beloved animated series. It wants to show you how that series keeps jokes from turning the whole enterprise to mush.
That sounds almost modest. It is how the book gets its teeth in. “Lower Decks” can look, at first glance, as though the jokes came first and the world politely rearranged itself around them. The show is fleet-footed, good-humored, and loose where it can afford to be. It makes room for whale officers, homicidal training holograms, and absurdly specific Trek callbacks without turning brittle or smug. A lazier companion volume would have treated that ease as explanation enough. Megan Treviño’s book, framed by introductions from Mike McMahan and Barry J. Kelly and dense with production material, argues the reverse. The looseness of the finished show sits on top of a tight operating system: readable silhouettes, navigable rooms, canon-aware revision, and relentless pressure to keep the joke clear without letting the world go soft.
The order of the book is not administrative. It is argumentative. Lower Deckers first, bridge crew second, Cerritos third. Only after that do the seasons fan outward. This is not tidy shelving in a prettier font. It is a lesson plan. Faces and silhouettes first. Rank and relation next. Then the ship as a place you can mentally walk through. Only then do the pages open into planets, props, species, one-off jokes, battle damage, and visual riffs across five seasons. By the time the seasonal material arrives, the eye has been trained. You know to watch the rolled sleeves, the hair silhouettes, the bridge anchors, the panel logic, the way a room has to stay clean enough for a joke to read at speed.
The material arrives in a flood: turnarounds, expression sheets, layout studies, bridge designs, LCARS variants, exterior revisions, damage states, prop breakdowns, environment paintings, dead ends, and those small production anecdotes that suddenly make a design choice click. Its nearest equivalent to plot is revision. Rough becomes workable. Then exact. Tendi is redesigned away from an older franchise habit of treating Orion women as fantasy and toward scientific keenness and Starfleet competence. The Cerritos gets a season-two glow-up because the early model could not survive the close shots the show wanted. Cetacean Ops, which could easily have remained a one-line absurdity, is treated as a fully workable workplace with screens, circulation, instruments, and labor. Even the punch lines need plumbing.
That discipline is the wager under every page, and page after page it turns out to be right. Comedy here is not what happens after the world has been built. Comedy is one of the pressures that shapes the build. A room must stay clean enough for a joke to land. A silhouette must register instantly for the punch line to work in motion. A prop cannot merely look good on the page; it has to function from multiple angles inside a crowded frame. The book never pauses to announce a thesis. It keeps building one. That is one reason it is more satisfying than many prettier, emptier art books. It has an argument to make, even if it prefers to make it by accumulation.
The prose works for its living. It is sturdily workmanlike: brisk, lucid, and deeply uninterested in pretending that labor is magic. Most of it comes in short, caption-like bursts, in a shop-floor vocabulary of read, simplify, build, push, update, anchor, figure out. Then it gets out of the way. Even the jokes arrive through practical comparison rather than ornamental phrasing. A ship resembles a tow truck or a lower-back tattoo. An alien city wants to feel like tropical cocktails. A practical vehicle gets described in terms closer to a Honda Civic than a mythic beast. That plainspoken rigor matters. It keeps the volume from curdling into reverence. It also makes process sound ordinary, which is to say real. These artists do not narrate their choices as revelation. They narrate them as work.
The method charges interest. The prose is more illuminating than beautiful. It explains with clean edges, but it does not often gather its best recurring insights into sustained critical pressure. At key moments one wants a firmer curatorial shove: not merely that a design changed, but what that change reveals about how “Lower Decks” organizes memory, feeling, and speed. The writing is rarely inert. It is not often transformative either. It trusts the material to carry the larger claim about how the show works, and most of the time that trust is justified. A little more synthesis would have made the book’s intelligence harder to dodge.
Still, that intelligence is genuine and unusually well distributed. The book is consistently alert to a problem many viewers register only subconsciously: a joke in animation does not land because the line is funny alone. It lands because the world around it has been made sturdy enough to support the impact. McMahan remarks early that because the show was going to be funny, it had to follow the rules of “Star Trek” even more closely than people might assume. These pages show he meant that literally. Every chapter is full of decisions designed to keep the comic energy from dissolving the world around it. The artists simplify where animation demands it, but they do so without bleaching the world. They preserve enough ship logic, enough interface memory, enough costume history, enough species recognition, enough command hierarchy that the show can bend the franchise without snapping it.
That is what makes the book feel more substantial than its category usually allows. It belongs less with coffee-table memorabilia than with the sturdier line of books that explain how visual grammars think. Phil Szostak’s “The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian (Season One)” is a useful point of comparison here: both books are interested in how a large inherited world gets kept coherent while still making room for surprise. But “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” has a distinct problem to solve. It must protect Trek structure while making space for cartoon velocity, side-eye comedy, and a show whose whole social imagination depends on support staff rather than legends. That tension gives the book its snap.
Nowhere does the argument come into focus faster than in the Cerritos. One of the smartest things “Lower Decks” ever did was refuse the glamour of the flagship. The Cerritos must still read as Starfleet, but never as the Enterprise. It is a support vessel, a middle-management ship, the municipal service department of a franchise usually drawn to grandeur. Treviño’s book gets that all the way down. The hull is recognizably Trek, but purposefully ungainly. The name placement can read less like a heroic flourish than the decal on a public-works truck. The interiors are built for utility rather than glamour. Even the beauty is practical. That is not incidental. It is the show’s workaday imagination rendered in hull geometry, carpet, corridor width, and light. In a series about people who fix, carry, patch, inventory, and improvise while someone else gets the plaque, the ship itself had to stop preening.
The cast is designed under the same rule-set. Mariner’s looseness, Boimler’s anxious neatness, Tendi’s eager competence, Rutherford’s implant-enhanced sincerity, Freeman’s compressed authority, Ransom’s California-Riker overstatement, T’Ana’s hunched feline abrasion, Shaxs’s bulk with a soft center – all of it is present in the line before it is fully present in the script. The book is strongest when it shows how tiny visual cues do the work of a paragraph. A sleeve roll. A hair silhouette. A pupil size. A sideburn point. A pose that leaves enough room for acting. “Lower Decks,” it turns out, is not only funny in dialogue. It is funny in shape. It is funny in proportion. It is funny in how much or how little a body strains against uniform regulations.
That is where the volume stops behaving like a souvenir and starts acting like an X-ray. It never stops to preach, which helps. But it becomes, by demonstration, a sharp account of how long-franchise production culture works when it works well. The central problem is not originality versus fidelity in the abstract. It is how to steward a shared inheritance without embalming it. In a culture crowded with properties either trapped under museum glass or smothered in compulsory self-awareness, “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” models a better method: care through play. The artists preserve Trek not by kneeling before it, but by learning its forms so thoroughly that they can stretch them, tease them, and still keep the load-bearing beams intact. That is a good lesson for any inherited universe, and an even better one for criticism. Affection is not the enemy of rigor. Sometimes it is what makes rigor possible.
Its slyest service to the reader is that it retools the eye. On a second pass, the repeated emphasis on visual read, room logic, and environment function stops sounding like repetition and starts sounding like training. You begin to notice how often the artists use one strong landmark to orient the eye. How often a background has to support not just spectacle but blocking. How often a second joke lives behind the foreground action. How often a prop must be clear before it can be funny. You notice that a joke is not floating free in space. It has a floor plan. On a second pass, the book stops looking crowded and starts looking exact.
Its weakness is the one overabundance usually brings. The problem is not the amount of material. The problem is hierarchy within that amount. By the late-season spreads, accumulation sometimes outruns discovery. Iteration is one of the book’s main subjects, and rightly so, but it occasionally assumes that adjacent variants will generate significance on their own. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they amount to visual traffic without enough critical ranking. A few more moments of discrimination – why this revision mattered, why that alternate failed, what made one design problem especially revealing – would have sharpened the second half. The book never goes slack. It is simply better at preserving than at sorting once the archive gets thick.
The ending improves by lowering its voice. As the pages turn toward alternate designs, dead ends, acknowledgments, and the long list of hands involved, the volume stops behaving like a showcase and starts reading like a record of coordinated labor. A more self-congratulatory book would have strained for grandeur. This one grows quieter and, by doing so, truer. Animation is a time-based medium. It vanishes by succeeding. The smoother the finished scene, the less visible the compromise beneath it. What these final pages preserve is not just what made it on screen, but the narrowed field of choices that let the show move as freely as it does.
For me, that places “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” at 87/100, or 4 stars: easy to recommend without throat-clearing, richer on return than on first pass, and more exacting than its slick collector’s-object branding first suggests. It is not flawless. The prose does not always rise to the intelligence of the material, and the late abundance can blur into self-crowding. But its real accomplishment is harder to market and easier to value. It shows, with unusual clarity, how a fast, funny, apparently effortless show is kept from turning to mush – not by inspiration alone, but by repeated acts of visual discipline.
What lasts is a reversal.
You open the book expecting access. You close it with a model of comic engineering. Access was only the bait. The better pleasure is weirder, and better earned: the sense that every tossed-off laugh in “Lower Decks” had a floor plan, a silhouette sheet, a lighting pass, a rejected version, and a roomful of people making sure the joke did not topple the Trek logic carrying it. The Cerritos remains the book’s best emblem – slightly ungainly, industrious, full of pipes, jokes, and hidden labor, never mistaken for the flagship, and more lovable for exactly that reason. It was built to be useful.
How “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” reveals the visual discipline, structural care, and hidden labor that make comic looseness look effortless
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 1st, 2026
Most franchise art books treat access as a sufficient argument. Open the vault, fan out the sketches, let the reader feel specially admitted, and call it insight. “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” offers that pleasure, certainly, but it wants something harder to sell and easier to underestimate. It is not content to let you peek behind the scenes of a beloved animated series. It wants to show you how that series keeps jokes from turning the whole enterprise to mush.
That sounds almost modest. It is how the book gets its teeth in. “Lower Decks” can look, at first glance, as though the jokes came first and the world politely rearranged itself around them. The show is fleet-footed, good-humored, and loose where it can afford to be. It makes room for whale officers, homicidal training holograms, and absurdly specific Trek callbacks without turning brittle or smug. A lazier companion volume would have treated that ease as explanation enough. Megan Treviño’s book, framed by introductions from Mike McMahan and Barry J. Kelly and dense with production material, argues the reverse. The looseness of the finished show sits on top of a tight operating system: readable silhouettes, navigable rooms, canon-aware revision, and relentless pressure to keep the joke clear without letting the world go soft.
The order of the book is not administrative. It is argumentative. Lower Deckers first, bridge crew second, Cerritos third. Only after that do the seasons fan outward. This is not tidy shelving in a prettier font. It is a lesson plan. Faces and silhouettes first. Rank and relation next. Then the ship as a place you can mentally walk through. Only then do the pages open into planets, props, species, one-off jokes, battle damage, and visual riffs across five seasons. By the time the seasonal material arrives, the eye has been trained. You know to watch the rolled sleeves, the hair silhouettes, the bridge anchors, the panel logic, the way a room has to stay clean enough for a joke to read at speed.
The material arrives in a flood: turnarounds, expression sheets, layout studies, bridge designs, LCARS variants, exterior revisions, damage states, prop breakdowns, environment paintings, dead ends, and those small production anecdotes that suddenly make a design choice click. Its nearest equivalent to plot is revision. Rough becomes workable. Then exact. Tendi is redesigned away from an older franchise habit of treating Orion women as fantasy and toward scientific keenness and Starfleet competence. The Cerritos gets a season-two glow-up because the early model could not survive the close shots the show wanted. Cetacean Ops, which could easily have remained a one-line absurdity, is treated as a fully workable workplace with screens, circulation, instruments, and labor. Even the punch lines need plumbing.
That discipline is the wager under every page, and page after page it turns out to be right. Comedy here is not what happens after the world has been built. Comedy is one of the pressures that shapes the build. A room must stay clean enough for a joke to land. A silhouette must register instantly for the punch line to work in motion. A prop cannot merely look good on the page; it has to function from multiple angles inside a crowded frame. The book never pauses to announce a thesis. It keeps building one. That is one reason it is more satisfying than many prettier, emptier art books. It has an argument to make, even if it prefers to make it by accumulation.
The prose works for its living. It is sturdily workmanlike: brisk, lucid, and deeply uninterested in pretending that labor is magic. Most of it comes in short, caption-like bursts, in a shop-floor vocabulary of read, simplify, build, push, update, anchor, figure out. Then it gets out of the way. Even the jokes arrive through practical comparison rather than ornamental phrasing. A ship resembles a tow truck or a lower-back tattoo. An alien city wants to feel like tropical cocktails. A practical vehicle gets described in terms closer to a Honda Civic than a mythic beast. That plainspoken rigor matters. It keeps the volume from curdling into reverence. It also makes process sound ordinary, which is to say real. These artists do not narrate their choices as revelation. They narrate them as work.
The method charges interest. The prose is more illuminating than beautiful. It explains with clean edges, but it does not often gather its best recurring insights into sustained critical pressure. At key moments one wants a firmer curatorial shove: not merely that a design changed, but what that change reveals about how “Lower Decks” organizes memory, feeling, and speed. The writing is rarely inert. It is not often transformative either. It trusts the material to carry the larger claim about how the show works, and most of the time that trust is justified. A little more synthesis would have made the book’s intelligence harder to dodge.
Still, that intelligence is genuine and unusually well distributed. The book is consistently alert to a problem many viewers register only subconsciously: a joke in animation does not land because the line is funny alone. It lands because the world around it has been made sturdy enough to support the impact. McMahan remarks early that because the show was going to be funny, it had to follow the rules of “Star Trek” even more closely than people might assume. These pages show he meant that literally. Every chapter is full of decisions designed to keep the comic energy from dissolving the world around it. The artists simplify where animation demands it, but they do so without bleaching the world. They preserve enough ship logic, enough interface memory, enough costume history, enough species recognition, enough command hierarchy that the show can bend the franchise without snapping it.
That is what makes the book feel more substantial than its category usually allows. It belongs less with coffee-table memorabilia than with the sturdier line of books that explain how visual grammars think. Phil Szostak’s “The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian (Season One)” is a useful point of comparison here: both books are interested in how a large inherited world gets kept coherent while still making room for surprise. But “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” has a distinct problem to solve. It must protect Trek structure while making space for cartoon velocity, side-eye comedy, and a show whose whole social imagination depends on support staff rather than legends. That tension gives the book its snap.
Nowhere does the argument come into focus faster than in the Cerritos. One of the smartest things “Lower Decks” ever did was refuse the glamour of the flagship. The Cerritos must still read as Starfleet, but never as the Enterprise. It is a support vessel, a middle-management ship, the municipal service department of a franchise usually drawn to grandeur. Treviño’s book gets that all the way down. The hull is recognizably Trek, but purposefully ungainly. The name placement can read less like a heroic flourish than the decal on a public-works truck. The interiors are built for utility rather than glamour. Even the beauty is practical. That is not incidental. It is the show’s workaday imagination rendered in hull geometry, carpet, corridor width, and light. In a series about people who fix, carry, patch, inventory, and improvise while someone else gets the plaque, the ship itself had to stop preening.
The cast is designed under the same rule-set. Mariner’s looseness, Boimler’s anxious neatness, Tendi’s eager competence, Rutherford’s implant-enhanced sincerity, Freeman’s compressed authority, Ransom’s California-Riker overstatement, T’Ana’s hunched feline abrasion, Shaxs’s bulk with a soft center – all of it is present in the line before it is fully present in the script. The book is strongest when it shows how tiny visual cues do the work of a paragraph. A sleeve roll. A hair silhouette. A pupil size. A sideburn point. A pose that leaves enough room for acting. “Lower Decks,” it turns out, is not only funny in dialogue. It is funny in shape. It is funny in proportion. It is funny in how much or how little a body strains against uniform regulations.
That is where the volume stops behaving like a souvenir and starts acting like an X-ray. It never stops to preach, which helps. But it becomes, by demonstration, a sharp account of how long-franchise production culture works when it works well. The central problem is not originality versus fidelity in the abstract. It is how to steward a shared inheritance without embalming it. In a culture crowded with properties either trapped under museum glass or smothered in compulsory self-awareness, “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” models a better method: care through play. The artists preserve Trek not by kneeling before it, but by learning its forms so thoroughly that they can stretch them, tease them, and still keep the load-bearing beams intact. That is a good lesson for any inherited universe, and an even better one for criticism. Affection is not the enemy of rigor. Sometimes it is what makes rigor possible.
Its slyest service to the reader is that it retools the eye. On a second pass, the repeated emphasis on visual read, room logic, and environment function stops sounding like repetition and starts sounding like training. You begin to notice how often the artists use one strong landmark to orient the eye. How often a background has to support not just spectacle but blocking. How often a second joke lives behind the foreground action. How often a prop must be clear before it can be funny. You notice that a joke is not floating free in space. It has a floor plan. On a second pass, the book stops looking crowded and starts looking exact.
Its weakness is the one overabundance usually brings. The problem is not the amount of material. The problem is hierarchy within that amount. By the late-season spreads, accumulation sometimes outruns discovery. Iteration is one of the book’s main subjects, and rightly so, but it occasionally assumes that adjacent variants will generate significance on their own. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they amount to visual traffic without enough critical ranking. A few more moments of discrimination – why this revision mattered, why that alternate failed, what made one design problem especially revealing – would have sharpened the second half. The book never goes slack. It is simply better at preserving than at sorting once the archive gets thick.
The ending improves by lowering its voice. As the pages turn toward alternate designs, dead ends, acknowledgments, and the long list of hands involved, the volume stops behaving like a showcase and starts reading like a record of coordinated labor. A more self-congratulatory book would have strained for grandeur. This one grows quieter and, by doing so, truer. Animation is a time-based medium. It vanishes by succeeding. The smoother the finished scene, the less visible the compromise beneath it. What these final pages preserve is not just what made it on screen, but the narrowed field of choices that let the show move as freely as it does.
For me, that places “The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks” at 87/100, or 4 stars: easy to recommend without throat-clearing, richer on return than on first pass, and more exacting than its slick collector’s-object branding first suggests. It is not flawless. The prose does not always rise to the intelligence of the material, and the late abundance can blur into self-crowding. But its real accomplishment is harder to market and easier to value. It shows, with unusual clarity, how a fast, funny, apparently effortless show is kept from turning to mush – not by inspiration alone, but by repeated acts of visual discipline.
What lasts is a reversal.
You open the book expecting access. You close it with a model of comic engineering. Access was only the bait. The better pleasure is weirder, and better earned: the sense that every tossed-off laugh in “Lower Decks” had a floor plan, a silhouette sheet, a lighting pass, a rejected version, and a roomful of people making sure the joke did not topple the Trek logic carrying it. The Cerritos remains the book’s best emblem – slightly ungainly, industrious, full of pipes, jokes, and hidden labor, never mistaken for the flagship, and more lovable for exactly that reason. It was built to be useful.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
This is going to be an unapologetically positive review as I love Lower Decks. I also followed the original Twitter account by the series creator Mike McMahan that proposed episode scenarios for a mythical eighth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. With that said, when Lower Decks was originally being promoted I was a little sceptical about a wise cracking cartoon version of one of my favourite shows. Would it be the Star Trek series that I (Gasp!) wouldn't enjoy?
Well there was no need to worry on that account because Lower Decks is easily one of the best Trek series. This book goes some way to demonstrating why this is.
It's a fascinating look behind the scenes showing the incredible amount of work and love poured into the show. I'm a die hard Trekkie and even I had moments where I read what they'd paid attention to and thought "I would have never noticed if they didn't" the art team on this show went so far beyond the usual to get things right.
Not only that, the book also reveals the design process behind the many moments where Lower Decks had the chance to flesh out never seen references from the previous shows and the creation of all new components of the Trek universe such as the Texas class.
The artwork as you'd expect is beautifully presented and meticulously curated. The LCARS graphics really ground the Lower Decks characters into the Next Generation universe and I never picked up the fact that even the carpets on the Cerritos continue the theme until I read it here!
The whole book looks like a LCARS screen and it made me think how cool an app it would make - especially with the episode guide section fleshed out a bit too. However we're limited to the book for now at least so one of the very few nitpicks I can make is that I would love for the episodes and their writing to be talked about in more depth so the book would work as a kind of watchers companion - especially in the DS9 episode where they hilariously spoofed the title sequence for example. I also wished they'd included the Strange New Worlds crossover episode Those Old Scientists and maybe some words from the cast but to be fair this is an art book and it is right that the amazing art team behind the show take the plaudits.
To sum up then: this book is aimed squarely at existing fans who love and miss the show. It's detailed about the art and the episode crafting and even Trek experts stand a good chance of discovering something they didn't know before while reading. It's a fond reminder of the humorous but thoughtful ethos that went into Lower Decks and it deserves a place on any fans book shelf or coffee table.
I received a free ARC via Netgalley in exchange for my honest review
Originally reviewed on CymruBoyosBookBlog
Well there was no need to worry on that account because Lower Decks is easily one of the best Trek series. This book goes some way to demonstrating why this is.
It's a fascinating look behind the scenes showing the incredible amount of work and love poured into the show. I'm a die hard Trekkie and even I had moments where I read what they'd paid attention to and thought "I would have never noticed if they didn't" the art team on this show went so far beyond the usual to get things right.
Not only that, the book also reveals the design process behind the many moments where Lower Decks had the chance to flesh out never seen references from the previous shows and the creation of all new components of the Trek universe such as the Texas class.
The artwork as you'd expect is beautifully presented and meticulously curated. The LCARS graphics really ground the Lower Decks characters into the Next Generation universe and I never picked up the fact that even the carpets on the Cerritos continue the theme until I read it here!
The whole book looks like a LCARS screen and it made me think how cool an app it would make - especially with the episode guide section fleshed out a bit too. However we're limited to the book for now at least so one of the very few nitpicks I can make is that I would love for the episodes and their writing to be talked about in more depth so the book would work as a kind of watchers companion - especially in the DS9 episode where they hilariously spoofed the title sequence for example. I also wished they'd included the Strange New Worlds crossover episode Those Old Scientists and maybe some words from the cast but to be fair this is an art book and it is right that the amazing art team behind the show take the plaudits.
To sum up then: this book is aimed squarely at existing fans who love and miss the show. It's detailed about the art and the episode crafting and even Trek experts stand a good chance of discovering something they didn't know before while reading. It's a fond reminder of the humorous but thoughtful ethos that went into Lower Decks and it deserves a place on any fans book shelf or coffee table.
I received a free ARC via Netgalley in exchange for my honest review
Originally reviewed on CymruBoyosBookBlog
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Verdict:
A humorous and nostalgic look behind the scenes of Star Trek: Lower Decks and the adventures of the USS Cerritos crew.
What worked for me:
Getting insight into the development of the characters aboard the Cerritos — and the wider Lower Decks universe — was genuinely fascinating. Seeing how these personalities evolved from early concepts into the characters we know on screen adds a new layer of appreciation for the show.
The artwork itself is excellent, and the commentary explaining why certain design choices were made gives a real sense of the creativity and thought that went into the series.
Standout elements:
• Beautiful concept artwork
• Insightful commentary on character and world design
Who is this for:
Fans of Lower Decks and readers interested in animation, character design, and the creative process behind a television series.
Final thoughts:
A fun and thoughtful companion that brought back the emotional highs and humour that make Lower Decks such an enjoyable part of the Star Trek universe.
Verdict:
A humorous and nostalgic look behind the scenes of Star Trek: Lower Decks and the adventures of the USS Cerritos crew.
What worked for me:
Getting insight into the development of the characters aboard the Cerritos — and the wider Lower Decks universe — was genuinely fascinating. Seeing how these personalities evolved from early concepts into the characters we know on screen adds a new layer of appreciation for the show.
The artwork itself is excellent, and the commentary explaining why certain design choices were made gives a real sense of the creativity and thought that went into the series.
Standout elements:
• Beautiful concept artwork
• Insightful commentary on character and world design
Who is this for:
Fans of Lower Decks and readers interested in animation, character design, and the creative process behind a television series.
Final thoughts:
A fun and thoughtful companion that brought back the emotional highs and humour that make Lower Decks such an enjoyable part of the Star Trek universe.
Read
March 18, 2026Having read the e-book version made things a little difficult, because the book’s focus really is just on the art of the show. While there the notes from on the different variations of some sets and characters was interesting to see, because a majority of them were written in pink or light blue ink, they were very difficult to read, and simply became blurry when trying to zoom into the image. There was a lot of redundancy, such as multiple times that a bottle episode is defined, but overall, there was some interesting information. It was cool to read about how they were the first to show us some places that have frequently been mentioned, but not visited in the live-action shows and movies, as well as some of the difficulties they faced with animating legacy locations and characters. Personally, I would have loved some more information on how they worked with some of those actors and behind-the-scenes crew to create what we saw, but ultimately, the focus of the book is on the visuals, and so there’s not much about the script writing process that was included, just as there was barely any mention of the abrupt decision to end the series with season Five.
May 14, 2026
While it's thin as a "making of" per se, The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks still collects the thoughts and observations of the best of NuTrek's shows (I said it!) in the margins of lavish set paintings, ship models, sketches & studies, abandoned designs, and character models, from the show as a whole and for each of its 50 episodes. It's great to be able to peruse environments and spot various Easter Eggs without the need for a Pause button, and I ended up discovering design choices that I hadn't noticed or thought of while watching the show. It made me appreciate the work that went into Lower Decks even more. If I have a complaint, it's perhaps that the last season gets short shrift, as I remember designs that aren't in the book (the Klingon barge is one), as if we were running out of pages. Similarly, while the Strange New Worlds crossover is mentioned, the SNW models would have been nice to see. Nevertheless, I feel like this is a picture book, I'll open again and wax nostalgically over. 7 seasons and a movie, you cowards!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I’m a huge Star Trek fan, and Lower Decks is my favorite series in the entire franchise. This book had everything I wanted: work-in-progress sketches, behind-the-scenes insights, and quick explanations of creative decisions. For example, they’ll show all the different hairstyles they considered for Tendi and explain in a sentence why they choose the final design. The book begins with character and ship design, and then walks through every single episode.
What really blew me away was the sheer amount of thought and care poured into every aspect of the show. I hadn’t fully appreciated how much thought went into designing the ships, planets, and characters. They made sure everything stayed consistent within the Star Trek lore. This would make a fantastic gift for any Star Trek fan, even if you’re not certain they’ve watched Lower Decks. The sheer number of Easter eggs and references alone make it worth flipping through.
(Arc review via NetGalley)
What really blew me away was the sheer amount of thought and care poured into every aspect of the show. I hadn’t fully appreciated how much thought went into designing the ships, planets, and characters. They made sure everything stayed consistent within the Star Trek lore. This would make a fantastic gift for any Star Trek fan, even if you’re not certain they’ve watched Lower Decks. The sheer number of Easter eggs and references alone make it worth flipping through.
(Arc review via NetGalley)
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I love looking behind the scenes and seeing how something is made. And I love Star Trek Lower Decks. So, of course, this book was ideal for me.
The book starts with a quick introduction about how challenging it was creating Lower Decks, not only as an animated Star Trek show but also as one set up in the future. Then we go through character design: of our lower deckers but also the bridge crew. I loved the character's sketches and how they evolved into characters we love. You can see how much thought was put into each design.
The main part of the book is focused on the episodes. It goes through each one. Usually there are three pages from each episode – showing the locations, important items and characters. There are quotes from different production members explaining why something looks that way or what inspired it. And what I found the most interesting – the explanation of Easter eggs. I haven't seen all Star Trek series, so having these connections explained was very useful. Not only are bigger cameos shown here, even small design details are explained.
Overall, this book is a great companion to the show. Whether it's the first or fifth watch, everybody will find these insights useful and interesting. And if after reading this you don't respect the animators and their hard work, then there's no hope for you.
Thank you to Net galley and the publisher for providing me with a digital copy of this book.
The book starts with a quick introduction about how challenging it was creating Lower Decks, not only as an animated Star Trek show but also as one set up in the future. Then we go through character design: of our lower deckers but also the bridge crew. I loved the character's sketches and how they evolved into characters we love. You can see how much thought was put into each design.
The main part of the book is focused on the episodes. It goes through each one. Usually there are three pages from each episode – showing the locations, important items and characters. There are quotes from different production members explaining why something looks that way or what inspired it. And what I found the most interesting – the explanation of Easter eggs. I haven't seen all Star Trek series, so having these connections explained was very useful. Not only are bigger cameos shown here, even small design details are explained.
Overall, this book is a great companion to the show. Whether it's the first or fifth watch, everybody will find these insights useful and interesting. And if after reading this you don't respect the animators and their hard work, then there's no hope for you.
Thank you to Net galley and the publisher for providing me with a digital copy of this book.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Star Trek: Lower Decks, now sadly no longer in production, is an amazing series that parodies and celebrate all things Trek to the nerdiest extent possible. Now fans are in for a wild and glorious warp speed adventure with "The Art of Star Trek: Lower Decks", which goes where no coffee table book has gone before. The book provides intense and insightful coverage of the series' artwork starting with character and ship design and than moving into a detailed artistic analysis of all 50 episodes. The result is a highly engaging and artistically sophisticated book that masterfully depicts the animation challenges the series' artists overcame while demonstrating its success at creating sequential artwork for storytelling. Finally, anyone planning a rewatch should really consider snagging a copy of this exceptional book first.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, IDW Publishing, for providing me with a DRC in exchange for my honest review.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, IDW Publishing, for providing me with a DRC in exchange for my honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I received a free review copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
4.5 stars. Loved this! I would have loved more behind the scenes stories, but this is an Art of book so of course the focus is on the design choices and process. Fascinating. Loved the episode by episode look at the whole series. Will absolutely be picking up a print copy when this releases in May.
4.5 stars. Loved this! I would have loved more behind the scenes stories, but this is an Art of book so of course the focus is on the design choices and process. Fascinating. Loved the episode by episode look at the whole series. Will absolutely be picking up a print copy when this releases in May.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Welcome to the
Federation Starship
U.S.S Ceritos.
This brilliant
beautiful
animated series
focuses not
on the Command crew
of the ship
but, four young officers
merely Ensigns.
Skewing
everything that
we have come to expect
from a Star Trek
TV series.
AND
it is blazingly funny.
This book shows us
the painstaking
work that went
into crafting the
artwork that brings
this unique crew
to life.
Federation Starship
U.S.S Ceritos.
This brilliant
beautiful
animated series
focuses not
on the Command crew
of the ship
but, four young officers
merely Ensigns.
Skewing
everything that
we have come to expect
from a Star Trek
TV series.
AND
it is blazingly funny.
This book shows us
the painstaking
work that went
into crafting the
artwork that brings
this unique crew
to life.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Otherworldly inside look at Lower Decks. This stellar art book covers 5 seasons of Lower Deck's characters, ships, and worlds. Seeing the main character's evolution from ideas to final design is awesome. If you are a fan of the show, this is an excellent book to dive deep with. This book releases May 5th, 2026. Thank-you, IDW Publishing, for this complimentary copy. Opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.
May 5, 2026
My expectations were super high but this exceeded them. Gorgeous art on display, great design insights, and Wonderful presentation.
May 15, 2026
A fun look at the art and development of the best modern Trek series.
May 23, 2026
WOW! Nothing but Lower Decks art. Amazing!
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