Sometimes in an artist’s life you have to admit that there just is no way to top someone else’s design anymore. If something hits the spot in a perfect manner, you don’t have to radically change it, just for the sake of it. You better try to adapt to it. Which is commonly known as “homage” or “tribute”. And that’s what I did here.

#1: The Road (Original)

#2: The Road (Custom)

#3: The Road (Custom)

#4: The Road (Custom)

#5: The Road (Custom)

I wanna start with the wonderfully sad and hopeless, original cover artwork (#1) of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ score for The Road. I love how this soundtrack looks nothing like the film’s dull and boring poster campaign. Which is a real relief. I can’t understand why they went for this generic poster design, when the film delivered such classic shots, as the one featured here. But if you remember the trailers back then, they promoted it as an action flick anyway, so it’s not really surprising. I’m all the more pleased, that Cave and Ellis went for another route and captured this post-apocalyptic atmosphere from the film perfectly – and I mean that as well for the cover artwork, as for the music itself, which is beautiful.

Usually I didn’t plan to add custom artworks to this soundtrack (why should I?), but I came across that website with movie stills and designs and couldn’t resist. The covers I created (#2, #3) are based on shots taken directly out of the movie. At first I tried to re-create the album credits with my own font types, but it didn’t work out as I wanted (finding the exact same font can be a pain in the ass sometimes…). So I extracted the original title and credits and added them to my customs. As always I have been very keen on the correct allignment of the text, so that the transitions between the covers are as smooth as possible.

The other two covers (#4, #5) I created way back when the score was released. They are based on two amazing concept artworks created by deviantArt user “Karezoid“. He met the tone of the film perfectly, but his posters inexplicably got rejected. In the end they used one of his designs for the polish edition of Cormac McCarthy’s bestselling book., which is cooler anyway, because a book usually is always better than it’s film adaptation.