Jas Bell on designing for the biggest icons in music and sports

At 16, Jas Bell got kicked out of school, showed up at a Kanye West tour stop in Florida with no tickets, and ended up on the N.E.R.D. bus after Pharrell spotted him at the back gate. That improvised education – watching world-building happen from the inside – set the trajectory for everything that followed. Bell has spent close to a decade as SZA’s Art Director & Design Lead, shaping the identity of the SOS album cycle and its sprawling merch. His reach now extends to work for Metro Boomin, the Super Bowl, NBA, WNBA and NWSL. He also runs Hazelwood, his own brand and creative platform. In this interview, the St. Louis-born creative director discusses how friendship drives his best work, what luxury fashion has taught him about longevity, and why merch needs the same rigour as any other form of design. TBI: Growing up in St. Louis, do you associate your first interests in design and visual culture with anything in particular? JB: Yeah, I definitely do. St. Louis is an interesting place. We’ve come to build something that’s uniquely us, but we’re right there in the middle of the map, so we’re a melting pot of different interests and visual nods. So, growing up, I felt like I got to see everything, because sometimes it felt like we were always on the outside looking in. (Laughs) We’re the ‘Gateway to the West,’ so that influence was there, but then there was this Southern charm that we incorporated as a city. A lot of that Southern influence comes from us sitting literally right on the Mississippi River, and all the early Black settlers who ended up calling St. Louis home for a new start. Not to mention the Northern influence we had as an industrial city. Those early factories and industries were the heartbeat of the city.