“Stranger Things: Season Five” by Kyle Dixon, Michael Stein, Various Artists

What a mess! The very last season of Stranger Things rolled around at the end of last year with a huge buzz and it really seemed as if half of humanity had nothing better to do than once again lose their minds to ugly Vecna and his ghastly monsters from the Upside Down. Like many others, I too found myself perched in front of the TV on New Year’s Eve – or rather New Year’s Night, because due to timezone constraints, the grande finale wasn’t aired until 2:30 AM! I was watching it with my 14-year-old and expected nothing less than a flood of tears and total emotional wreckage for my daughter and – if heavens willed it – some killer twist for me that would completely blow me away. But instead, 2.5 hours later, I crawled into bed with a resigned “meh” and a numb feeling of nothingness.

I guess that’s just how it goes, when you look forward to something for a very long time; you’re bound to be disappointed no matter what (hi there, r/gta6!).

And still, the signs were so promising, when you think about it. The Duffer brothers had everything going for them. After a really strong fourth season with a breathtaking finale, the stakes were higher than ever! Furthermore, the circumstances surrounding the Hollywood writers’ strike unexpectedly provided them with ample time to refine their scripts and bring the story of Eleven and her party to a satisfying conclusion. But I guess the many years that have passed have taken their toll, and the fact that all the child actors are now adults didn’t exactly help either. Also, wrapping up the most successful series on Netflix (and the whole world, let’s be honest) is ultimately just too much pressure for any creative individual. Name any lengthy franchise that came to a good and worthy conclusion! And I mean a definitive end, not this contemporary, never-ending crap. The only one that comes to mind is The Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t count since it’s an adaptation of the ultimate godfather of all fantasy novels. Maybe Back to the Future… maybe.

So, the Duffers played it safe. You can’t hardly blame them. At least they did it in an entertaining way, and ultimately Stranger Things came to an if not groundbreaking, then at least emotional and more or less conciliatory ending. That’s something, after all.

Just as much as I was looking forward to the final season, I was also looking forward to creating custom covers for this series one last time. Kyle Lambert’s poster designs are always a real treat and convey nostalgia with a sense of excitement and adventure, all in his trademark hand-drawn visual style. I couldn’t help but come up with my own versions of the official covers for the film score and the soundtrack album (#1, #3), which differ slightly in terms of image composition or background texture. These are purely personal preferences, that’s all. And my uncertainty in these matters is also reflected in two alternative versions, which I don’t want to keep from you either.

In addition to Lambert’s now-iconic drawings, the show also featured a really gorgeous illustration from artist Sam Green, which was prominently featured at the end of the closing credits sequence. Surly I had to turn it into a soundtrack cover (#6), right?

The rest of the promo material once again included a series of individual character posters, this time depicting our heroes in various stages of decline, war-torn and in the thick of battle. Dramatic poses and meaningful glances included. Just the usual end-of-the-world stuff.

The only notable feature of these posters is perhaps that they are actually one giant widescreen banner that has been divided into nine sections. Should you decide to use the custom covers I’ve created from this banner (#8 to #16), and if you’re lucky enough to be able to configure the album art transition animation in your music app of choice (hint: it might be labeled something like “Slide” or “Pan”), then every track change will end up looking as if a camera were panning from one person to the next. Woosa! That’s next-level!

The second batch of character posters features a considerably larger cast and, as far as I’m concerned, was also much harder to adapt into custom covers (#17 to 35). These digital-only posters were apparently intended to be used exclusively on social media, which would explain why I couldn’t find any versions larger than 1080p. When working with “low resolutions” like these, you always have to be extra careful, since nothing can be concealed through downscaling.

Each poster shows one of the characters, along with the number “5” in the background, rendered in the series’ trademark ITC Benguiat Medium Condensed. I expanded them in width, which means I also had to recreate the lighting effect that was unique on each poster. It took quite a bit of effort to recreate the curvature of the number and that red retro glow – including brightness, colour and texture – so that it looks seamless. Ultimately, though, I was able to convert all nineteen different posters into square format and present them to you as custom covers for the original score.

For those interested, here’s a clean version without any character portrait. Feel free to use it however you like!

Tribute Covers

Some of you may remember how, at the end of my last Stranger Things blog post, I wondered what the inevitable tribute covers collection for the final season might look like. At the time (after movies, TV shows, and popular music), I toyed with the idea of tackling video games and books. But somehow, that idea never quite came to fruition. Video games in the 1980s didn’t exactly have those iconic box art designs that you’d recognize at a glance. And I already covered everything else related to video games in Ready Player One. And books? These appear scattered across the globe in so many different editions that it’s almost impossible to pick the one cover that everybody would recognize. Also, it would almost exclusively be Stephen King novels anyway, which, admittedly, would make my tribute covers collection look a bit monotonous.

In the end, I decided to just go all in and ditch any restrictions regarding genre or medium whatsoever. I even went back to the earlier seasons and revisited old ideas I’d previously discarded and gave them a second chance — no matter how far-fetched they were — to create the once-and-for-all Stranger Things tribute covers collection.

To achieve this — and I really hate to admit it — I had to resort to the controversial tech of artificial intelligence. I wouldn’t have been able to create lots of the covers below, if it weren’t for such tools as Google’s Nano Banana or Adobe’s Generative Fill. They allowed me bring certain ideas to life, and in doing so, let even more ideas emerge from the back of my subconscious. Even though, admittedly, working with it wasn’t always that easy.

However, I’d like to make it absolutely clear that it was super important to me to not just feed various AI platforms with random text prompts and pass off the resulting AI slop as my own creative efforts. No, I’ve put a great deal of work, passion, and time into the following covers, to ensure that they are understood for what I intended them to be: handcrafted, well-thought-out tributes to one of the most significant eras in pop culture, filled with countless little details and lots of love. I really hope it shows!