On The Road Book Cover

For this project we were assigned to create a book cover for the title "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac. The book cover needed to represent the overall message of the book and incorporate some king of symbolism from it.

The book "On The Road" is about a group of men on a road trip during the beatnik era. This roadtrip is not one of fun sightseeing, it is one that spirals into dark themes. The group of men get engulfed in the world of parties and drugs and begin to make awful choices. Some themes seen in the story are hero worship, envy, and madness. I was extremely interested in the idea of how a roadtrip like this could send someone into madness, how a perfectly same person could spiral out of control. I tried to show the descent into madness one of the characters experienced by making the road on the cover go from straight to wavy to symbolize the mental state of the character.