Jason Arias on designing Time Shelter
Jason Arias is a freelance graphic designer, illustrator, and art director based in Nashville, TN. Here he takes us through his process for designing Time Shelter.
Synopsis for Time Shelter:
“In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first “clinic for the past,” an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine’s assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives—a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself.”
After a thoughtful review of my design process on Space Forces I asked Steve Attardo at W. W. Norton if I could work with him on something ‘weird.’ And as soon as I started reading I felt like he picked the perfect title for me—wry satire, lush descriptions, and a psychological focus.
The blue forget-me-nots dotting the landscape outside the time shelter draw a clear connection between the facility and its dealings with memory. I started designing with this icon in mind by placing the facility inside of the flower. I wanted the icon to feel simple and cheery, but could also read as a symbol for a cult to hint at a change in the shelter’s reception over time. The swirling stem that creates the ‘S’ in ‘Shelter’ is a reference to the augmented reality of each floor serving as a time capsule to a particular decade.
Gaustine is a Beatles aficionado and ’60s memorabilia collector, so I wanted to create a design that reads as nostalgic through a ’60s distortion. I used vibrant colors and blurring to suggest an altered state of consciousness.
As time shelters gain notoriety they become an escapist refuge for healthy people, so I created a counterpoint to the cheerful nostalgia of the first two directions with a more dystopian feel.
Steve gave me the idea of branding the facility and placing it on a badge worn by one of the staffers. In this first iteration I created an icon where the shelter is sitting in front of the ‘magic mountain’—the Matterhorn. The lines receding to the peak where a forget-me-not sits atop the summit is a reference to going back in time. When you arrive at the shelter time stops and you have the luxury of choosing when you want to inhabit.
I designed this direction by using some of the icons created during my earlier branding experiments. In the book, the basement is a bomb shelter, the first floor is a capsule to WWII-era 1940s, followed by a floor for the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, respectively. Each floor is reduced to an icon—fallout shelter, dropped bomb, television, peace-emblem guitar, and disco ball. I used the same colors as the fallout shelter sign to signify time shelters as a place of refuge and round tube-type to suggest movement through time.
Gaustine has a collection of vintage cigarette packages on display in his cabinet of tchotchkes, so this cover’s a reference to that. When time shelters eventually make it to Bulgaria, socialists who want to bring back the 1960s and ’70s clash with nationalists mired in the triumph over the Ottomans in 1876. So I used the crowned lion from the April Uprising flag, apricot color of the shelter, and red, white, and green from the present-day Bulgarian flag to round out this design.
For this direction I illustrated Gaustine with his arms open welcoming you to the facility. He’s standing in a small bed of forget-me-nots among doors at odd perspectives, representing manufactured nostalgia.
This type-driven direction was inspired by Gaustine’s Beatles obsession. While designing I’ll often say the title over in my head a million times, which helps me free associate. Repeating ‘Time Shelter’ eventually blended into ‘Helter Skelter,’ which summoned the lyrics and got me visualizing letters sliding into each other. I borrowed a variation of the time shelter icon from another direction, but used dots as stations on the clock with a forget-me-not above the shelter to signify stopped time. I went with the color scheme from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to emphasize a ’60s feel.
During my early experiments I was messing around with black-and-white arrows, one pointing forward and the other backward. I made a pattern with them and used it to fill the Matterhorn and background, creating a disorienting optical art effect, with a graphic, red symbol for the shelter that partially resembles a stop sign.
I naturally gravitate towards flat, graphic, two-tone designs which made this split-portrait an apt fit for the convoluted relationship between the narrator and protagonist. The first option has clocks as decorative framing devices with each representing a timestamp like the floors in the shelter. Gaustine’s mouth-as-forget-me-not is a reference to time shelters becoming an ‘opium of the masses.’ In the alternate direction (below), the dotted lines between doors suggest a time travel effect moving through floors in the shelter.
The first option in this direction was Steve’s favorite, but he felt the stopped clocks made more sense as Gaustine’s mouth with the forget-me-nots as border elements. More importantly, the shape of the face, particularly the cheeks, weren’t reading properly and the color scheme was a bit too harsh.
Final cover
In this new version I leveled-out the cheeks and switched to a softer color scheme that ties in time shelter’s signature apricot color and blue for the forget-me-nots.
After the team’s approval, Steve shared that the author was on board as well and with a few tweaks to the type sizing we finalized the cover.
I was especially grateful for this project as I’ve been a fan of Steve’s work since his start with Rodrigo Corral. His thoughtful art direction and openness to my experiments made for a truly fun process.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.