Jason Arias takes us behind the scenes of his creative journey, offering insight into the inspiration behind several of his latest projects that have reimagined Bridgeman Images content in fresh and inventive ways.
Below, Arias uncovers the creative influences behind some of his most popular book covers, such as: ‘Love Novel’ and ‘The Physics of Sorrow’.
Q: How did your journey to becoming a cover designer all start?
Graphic design is my third career, so my path here has been pretty windy. I started off in IT, then took a detour to help my dad run his marble and granite business. There were aspects I loved about his line of work, but I wanted a fresh start at something that felt like it was my own, so I went back to school for design.
My approach as a designer was heavily shaped by studying and interning with Paul Sahre. His encouragement to interrogate an idea coupled with classmates that were continually pushing their craft was an exciting learning environment to be a part of.
My experience interning was marked with the same kind of effervescent energy. There were interns from other countries, a week-long design workshop, a foosball competition—many forms of community building around a shared affinity for graphic design. Up until that point, I had never been to a job where both the environment and the work were fun. So when my internship ended, there was this inertia, like I’d just jumped off a carnival ride and had to reacclimate to gravity. I was disoriented by the uncertainty of how to find that kind of work as a new grad, so I let new opportunities lead the way as they arose.
A couple of years later, that included a stint with Oliver Munday. There was a kinship to Paul in both the environment and the breadth of work. I consider Paul and Oliver generalists in the sense that they can design anything, but with the deft of a specialist. That’s something I deeply admire and humbly aspire to. They make it look effortless.
Through working with them, I also realized my preference for working in small teams with relatively short deadlines. Designing books allows you to deep-dive into an author’s life or imagined world, experiment with image-making and type, and usually within a few weeks you wrap-up and move on to the next immersion. It’s a fun way to be continually exposed to new ideas and life experiences.
After those two formative stints ended, there was some disorientation, as I mentioned earlier, because there was the euphoric experience of being really engaged with the work and being mentored, but both were short-lived. There was a real sense of loss, which sounds melodramatic, but that’s how it felt. Hindsight clarified how fortunate I was to have had those experiences so early in my career.
I spent the next seven years in various roles of editorial design, illustration, and art direction, then had the anticlimactic revelation that if I wanted to design book covers I needed to work in-house. I was hired at Simon & Schuster, where I designed covers (across three imprints), mechanicals for front- and back-list books, reprints, ARCs, prepared printer files for special finishes, and sat in on design pitches with all the stakeholders. It was an incredibly valuable education in all things book publishing, and taught me a lot about my limitations and where I needed to grow as a communicator and designer.
During the pandemic, I shifted to freelancing, moved down to Nashville, TN, and now ponder what my next career will be as Big Tech foists AI on the creative industry. My primary focus is on book cover and interior design, but I enjoy projects in other areas when possible. I love perfumery and had recently taken a workshop to make a custom fragrance, so it was a dream to connect this personal hobby to my work by designing a journal for the Institute for Art and Olfaction. I’m hoping to find more ways to design with/for perfumers. Scent lovers, check out Zoologist!
Q: Can you talk us through your Creative Process?
I use wordplay to kickstart the brainstorming process, then I write out a list of viable ideas outside the canvas in InDesign. This way I can ruminate on them while I work on title treatments.
I repeat the title in my head over and over while designing, to the point where I’m no longer thinking about it consciously. It might be a way of pushing it down into the subconscious where tangential things can then surface and create unexpected ideas or combinations.
After seeing what typographic styles I like, I get a sense of what idea+type combinations have potential and then do image research or creation. In the beginning stage of combining type and imagery there's usually a bunch of wrestling with limitations, with my initial ideas and my image-making abilities. In that fumbling about I sometimes end up with an accident or new perspective that's more interesting than where I started. So my process usually starts off pragmatically and then becomes more experimental. The loss of control can be frustrating, especially on a tight deadline, but it's also fun to be immersed in the process and feel led to a new solution rather than having a preconceived notion and taking a direct path there.
For anyone interested in a tried-and-true creative process, I highly recommend John Gall’s Domestika course. He shares his dead simple, but brilliant method for pragmatically approaching cover design.
On the ‘Love Novel’ cover:
I got this assignment for a roughly 100-page novel and was instantly intrigued. It's about a married couple in a vitriolic relationship. The guy is an out of work Dante scholar and the woman is a “passable actress.” They're both underemployed, past due on rent, and have a newborn child. There are all these forces that are coming down on them, and they're crumbling under the pressure, often taking out their unprocessed emotions on each other. The language is so powerful and brutal. Ivana’s writing is truly masterful. I read the book in one sitting.
The first image I had was the letter “O” in “Love” as a dark abyss or a gaping maw to hell, because of the Dante's Inferno connection. I was hanging onto that visual while playing with another idea of contortion as a visual metaphor for a painful marriage. While searching on Bridgeman I stumbled on an image of a noose.
The idea of a tandem noose popped into my head and made me laugh, so I tried to intertwine two ropes as a gallows humor take on the dysfunctional relationship. The tandem noose could also be read as an upside down heart, which felt like an apt visual for their malformed love. Similar to the writing, I liked the bluntness of the image, but there was also some poetry in its form that felt complementary to the meticulous craft put into each sentence.
Continuing image research, I found a series that was painted by Amos Nattini depicting the Divine Comedy. He painted people completely engulfed in flames. They're so striking. The juxtaposition of a book called Love Novel and that kind of imagery felt pretty funny to me. If you can set aside how brutal the writing is, there were actually a few lines in the book that had me laughing out loud because of how cruel they are.
One of the later images I stumbled on was chosen for the final direction, “The Torture of Prometheus.” I just love the guy’s expression. I used a closeup crop of his face so you're not exactly sure why he’s screaming, but in the full image he's getting eaten alive by an eagle. It’s visually interesting and it tied into this excerpt that stuck with me after reading:
“The tears just wouldn’t come.
Not a single one.
These things happen: women walk a mile between walls, lose a whole night over some bullshit, put superhuman effort into it, and then, instead of breaking down, surrendering and finally resting, they stay bolt upright, as if they’d swallowed a broom or simply turned to stone. They even manage to wear clean clothes. Whereas men fall apart right away, they shatter like glass, no longer serving any purpose – yet it’s not their fault, they’re merely reacting honestly. Men are confused by the sight of those wrinkly bunnies, pets and teddy bears falling out of red maternity coats and calling themselves their children; men are startled by the thought of a difficult sleep-deprived phase in which they’ll have to start loving those children, as well as the realisation that the miracle of birth passed them by as they took part in it only technically, since they experienced no pain or suffering – and so they retreat at the accusation that they don’t understand anything, that they don’t understand anything at all, which she said to him several times that morning, and instead of realising it was just a symptom of dramatic mood swings for which she had medical justification, he took it all quite literally, skipped the debate, skipped steps on the dash downstairs, and left without a word. And all that just to demonstrate to her, sourly, that he was not needed at all because, at the end of the day, every baby manual claimed the child needed only the mother, the breast and milk; each baby manual omitted his role, although she had done her best to assign him the worst one, way back there in the maternity ward, when they were told the child was too weak to suckle, had been born tired and listless, lacked the survival instinct – in short, that the child took after him.
She gave the diagnosis herself.”
On the ‘Your Absence Is Darkness’ cover:
It's a multi-generational saga and there are all these different perspectives of family members—falling in love, heartbreak, death and lots of grief. The publisher wanted a visual that was “charmingly existential, pleasurably fatalistic, casually heartbroken.” Something that signified, “there's a crack in everything.” In the story, the rural, Icelandic landscape is as much a character as the people themselves, so that was my starting point.
I sourced a royalty-free stock photo of a Scandinavian winter landscape and Photoshopped an exaggerated smiley face crying onto the side of a mountain. The publisher loved it and I thought it was a creative, funny take, so I was very pleased.
Then a few months later we found out there was a competing title that, had used the exact same photo, and it was about to be published at the same time. I couldn't believe it and was a bit heartbroken having to scrap that design. It was a good lesson on the fickle nature of working with free stock photos. Even though I changed the image a considerable amount, we still couldn’t use it.
At that point, we were under a time crunch, so I got in touch with Bridgeman for help from the Research team. I was promptly gifted a phenomenal gallery that gave me a huge head start for redesigning.
The publisher still wanted to incorporate an Icelandic landscape and there were many images to work with thanks to the research team.
For the final design, the publisher went with a contemporary painting by Richard Harrison. It’s a striking piece that projects the complex, inner emotional landscape of love and loss onto the physical landscape that’s a fixture in all of these narratives. The painting portrays the wintry environment in a way that feels both soft, malleable and cold, stoic, which I think captures the cycle of grieving where you melt into vulnerability and then freeze into loneliness and vice versa.
On the ‘Time Shelter’ & ‘The Physics of Sorrow’ cover:
These are a series design in a way, because the author, Georgi Gospodinov, won the Man Booker prize last year for Time Shelter and Liveright wanted to repackage these two books with a cohesive look.
I designed the hardcover version of Time Shelter, so I was already familiar with the story. Initially, the idea was to have a really distinctive type treatment and to incorporate aspects, either in the typography itself or through border treatments, that incorporate some of the author’s Bulgarian heritage.
I adapted some traditional Bulgarian embroidery patterns into border treatments to frame the original illustrations. We got pretty far along in the process and I thought that's where it was going to end up, but later learned that the author wanted something that was more modern, more abstract, and he specifically requested either fine art or photography for the cover design.
At this point, we were very close to the drop-deadline and I had to start over. So, I sent out an SOS to Bridgeman’s researchers. This was another example where your team found images that I never would have found on my own, especially on such a tight deadline. The final art for The Physics of Sorrow works so well for the story. Labyrinths are a huge part of the narrative structure and this image was just perfect for it.
For the Time Shelter cover, I was working with art from different artists and needed the images to work together cohesively, while also aligning with the cover of The Physics of Sorrow. I collaged an illustration of forget-me-nots, a painting of a man flying, and a painting of a bowler hat. Since Bridgeman allows designers to alter images, the artistic license you’re given is completely open-ended. This design wouldn’t have worked without it.
Luckily, the author was very pleased, and I received final approval with no time to spare. This is one of my favorite covers to date, so I am grateful for Bridgeman’s timely help in bringing this over the finish line.
(Bottom left image) Forget-me-not (colour engraving), Redouté, Pierre Joseph (1759-1840) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images
(Bottom right image) Fernandel (painting), Ochoa, Isy (b.1961) / Photo © Superstock / Bridgeman Images
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