Grunge, filth and even more grunge. The cover series to Howard Shore’s magnificent score to David Fincher’s cult thriller is characterized by its ghastly apparition. Though it never really got a proper release (what a shame!), there’ve been a few different soundtrack albums circling around. And I’ve remade all of their respective album artworks. First the commercial release by TVT Records in the US-American (#1) and European (#2) version. And then the rare bootleg, apparently scattered among movie buffs by Concorde in 1995 (#3). I’ve redesigned and altered them very slightly and added a texture to #2 to give it a little more depth.
My customs below are mostly just variations of existing DVD and Blu-ray sleeves, furnished with an extensive use of vintage textures and layers of scratches and dust. I love the dirty look of this whole series, it perfectly transports the mood and art style of the film. This time the texture gallery by deviantART user “laflaneuse” has provided a great source of material to work with.
The legendary title sequence from SE7EN still stands out as a landmark achievement in film design history and I’ve had a great time dissecting it and picking out certain typographical elements to form the album credits on cover #7.
The final piece in this gallery (#9) is based on an alternate poster by NY-based graphic designer Vincent Gabriele. It’s a welcome deviation from the rest of the crowd and features one of the many amazing shots of this awesome movie. Fincher’s got to be one of my favourite directors out there, the degree of perfectionism in his works still amazes and more importantly astonishes me again and again.
HQCovers 
These are really great. I like the simplicity of #2, and I also like #5 – the idea of the cover as one of John Doe’s diaries is pretty neat. I recently bought Basil Poledouris’ excellent soundtrack to Switchback. If you haven’t seen the film I highly recommend it – a classic mid ’90s serial killer/action adventure. But Intrada’s cover (based on the film’s marketing) is pretty cruddy….the film is set in winter amid snow-capped mountains and the marketing makes it look like it’s mid summer in the Wild West! So….you did such a great job when I made the Flight of the Navigator request I wondered if there was any chance of something similar here? It’s asking a lot, I know, just putting it out there! Keep up the fantastic work! 😃
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Thanks! I’ve never heard of Switchback before – and I grew up on 90s movies. But your description sounds really promising. I think I’ll have to check it out somehow :-)
Custom covers however are almost impossible since I can’t find any source material other than the poster design Intrada used for their soundtrack. They recently even re-released the score and kept the same album art for it. So… the only thing I could do was to colour-convert the original artwork so it looks a bit more authentic -> https://anakin022.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/switchback.jpg
Maybe I’ll have a flash of inspiration after seeing the film, who knows. If so, I’ll let you know ;)
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It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill thriller, but they knew how to make run-of-the-mill exciting back then. Yeah, even something as simple as colour-converting makes a difference – thanks for supplying that! The marketing was somewhat baffling for the film. Oh well. Seek out the film if you can, it’ll be an enjoyable couple of hours.
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