The groundbreaking, Oscar-winning Reznor/Ross soundtrack for THE SOCIAL NETWORK was released 10 years ago today. It has a new vinyl edition that includes the original artwork I created for the release in 2010: https://store.nin.com/products/the-social-network-vinyl - A thread on how that art came to be: 1/

For the TSN soundtrack art, my goal was to walk the line between representing the film and creating something that stood as a piece of art on its own, much as the soundtrack itself does. The cover image was the first challenge, as Sony wanted it to carry the film's branding. 2/

The film had a striking, iconic poster designed by Neil Kellerhouse. Sony wanted the soundtrack to be consistent with that, but neither Trent nor I wanted just a big straightforward picture of Jesse Eisenberg's face on an album that deserved to stand on its own from the film. 3/

I first tried some experiments with glitching out the cover portrait, but Sony rejected them (more on that later). But blurring out the photo and placing the title text over the eyes was enough to create a cover that evoked the film's branding while distancing itself from it. 4/

Given that we conceded a bit on the album cover, Trent said "let's make the inside packaging weird." Sony gave me a batch of publicity stills from the film to utilize if I wanted, but they were very generic -- a long way from a "weird" body of artwork that told its own story. 5/

An early idea I had was digital file corruption, using a #GlitchArt aesthetic as a metaphor for the corruption portrayed in the film, and how social media corrupts our perceptions of society and self. I began experimenting with different ways to destroy the publicity stills. 6/

Whereas in previous projects (especially WITH TEETH and YEAR ZERO) I'd used careful manual processes to create digital glitches (see https://www.patreon.com/posts/in-depth-nin-16104149 ), this time I actually destroyed images by opening them up in a text editor and adding/removing text to their raw code. 7/

These days there are no shortage of apps that make JPEG corruption effects easy to create, but back then it was a very experimental, trial-and-error process of opening up images in a text editor, deleting bits of code, typing gibberish in, and seeing what would happen. 8/

I would try inserting various chunks of junk text into different parts of an image's code, seeing where and how it would break the image. I tried a lot of text sources, like paragraphs from Star Trek slash fiction, but found text from random Wikipedia articles most useful: 9/

I found that JPEGs (left) and PSDs (right) corrupted in wonderfully different ways, and that rendering methods mattered (for example, damaged Photoshop files render much more interestingly in OSX's Preview than in Photoshop itself, which won't even open overly-damaged files). 10/

The results became an unsettling body of visual work that gave the haunting music its own unique story and point of view, deserved by an album that's so much more than just a "movie soundtrack." I'm immensely proud of what we created, and it's aged chillingly well. 11/

For NIN's new 10th anniversary vinyl release of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, I was pleased to see that they brought back my original, preferred glitch art version of the cover, which Sony had originally rejected for being too far off from the film's branding. 12/

You can see all of my glitch art from THE SOCIAL NETWORK soundtrack at https://www.rob-sheridan.com/design/the-social-network/1/thumbs //