A Year in Book Covers: From Hemingway to Dracula
Looking back over the past year, I’ve realised just how many book covers I had the privilege of creating. Ten in total — nine reimagining a classic selection of Ernest Hemingway’s most notable works, and one more commission to reinterpret Dracula by Bram Stoker. It’s been a wonderfully unexpected creative journey.
People often ask how I ended up designing book covers in the first place. The truth is refreshingly simple: publishers reached out directly. My first commission came from Penguin Classics for a George Orwell title — a dream project, especially since Animal Farm remains one of my all‑time favourite books. My most recent commission arrived from Kontrast izdavaštvo, a Serbian publisher, marking a full circle of sorts in this growing body of work.
Working With Stories I Know — and Stories I Don’t
Creating cover art is, for me, an enjoyable and intuitive process, especially when I’m familiar with the story. Orwell’s work, H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (which I illustrated in 2024), and Stoker’s Dracula all offered rich imagery to draw from. Hemingway, however, presented a different kind of challenge. I’ll confess: I hadn’t read his books before taking on the project.
To bridge that gap, I turned to AI for detailed synopses of each novel. It proved incredibly helpful, giving me a clear sense of the emotional landscape and thematic threads running through his work. Each book carries its own symbolic weight, and my task became finding a visual identity that honoured their individuality while still uniting them as a cohesive collection.
Finding My Visual Approach
Hemingway’s prose is famously sparse yet emotionally charged. I wanted the covers to reflect that duality — bold, minimal forms that hint at deeper meaning beneath the surface. Rather than illustrating literal scenes, I focused on distilling each story into a single, iconic image.
Minimalism became my guiding principle. I leaned into simple compositions, textured atmospheres, and subtle symbolism to echo Hemingway’s economy of language. Designing these covers became an exercise in restraint; deciding what to leave out was just as important as what to include.
The Dark Mirror of Dracula
Of all the covers I created this year, Dracula was my favourite. Like many people, I’ve read the book and seen countless film adaptations, but what truly surprised me was discovering the novel’s lesser‑known biblical connections. It’s said that Stoker imagined Dracula as an anti‑Christ figure, crafting a mythology that mirrors — and in many ways reverses — the structure of the Bible.
Once you start tracing those threads, the novel reveals itself as a dark reflection of Christian imagery and symbolism. Stoker wasn’t writing a religious allegory, but he clearly drew on biblical themes to shape the moral universe of the story. The narrative weaves together ideas of good versus evil, anti‑Christ motifs, purity and temptation, Christian symbols as weapons, and even an apocalyptic undertone.
This discovery inspired me to create a series of prints using actual pages from the Bible as the canvas — a way of visually exploring that tension between sacred text and gothic fiction.
