As a designer, the process of creating a book cover can be challenging, especially when it comes to translating the essence of the story into a visual representation. However, for Blue Hunger, the process was an exceptional one. In fact, the book was so visually compelling that ideas for the cover design started forming in my mind as I read through the manuscript.

Survival Is A Style is the first collection of poems by Christian Wiman in six years. After I started my career in the publishing industry as a designer, I was lucky enough to design a few covers for FSG and I was honored to design a cover for this book.

My usual process of designing a cover starts with setting a concept behind it. In the beginning of developing ideas for the design, I was confused about what to show on the cover because first, poems aren't my strong point since English is my second language and second, this book was one of the first covers I designed, so I was new to the design process. But soon enough I found some help from briefs. From the author questionnaire, Wiman suggested two poems as a conceptual guideline for the cover: Survival Is A Style and Poem Ending with a Line from Jacques Maritain. When I first read these two poems, I was unsure about the “meaning behind them”. But I read them repeatedly until I memorized them, and finally came to a conclusion with one idea—interruption. Normally I don’t design covers that share one theme, but I set this idea as a main concept for this cover because there were so many different ways to explore it visually.