Good Is Dead.

Brian Greene at the Edge of Categorization.

2008-07-23T15:56:00Z

The genesis, if you will, of the design and art direction of Brian Greene’s Icarus at the Edge of Time represents (for me), a prime example of problem solving at its purest and most exhilarating. What happened is that in the spring of 2007, Marty Asher (Brian Greene’s editor at Knopf) brought me a short manuscript by Brian for which he was having trouble finding a home. It was a fable, a science fiction tale of a teenage boy-genius (Icarus) who lives on a starship heading back to Earth after a generations-long mission and, against the stern warnings of his scientist father, commandeers a sort of pod-ship to go explore a black hole. When he returns from doing so, he finds that everything he knew has changed, and he learns a devastating lesson.

The problem was that traditional children’s book publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with it.

[continued…]

JUST ANNOUNCED: artbreak Live at Joe’s Pub August 4!

2008-07-03T16:21:01Z

[continued…]

Poster Series for The Wolfsonian-FIU’s Thoughts on Democracy (2008)

2008-06-28T17:50:00Z

Interiors for Brian Greene’s Icarus at the Edge of Time (2008)

2008-06-28T17:24:00Z

Commencement: Embracing Your Uncertainty.

2008-06-19T01:15:01Z

Last year (2007) I was invited to give the commencement speech at my dear Alma Mater, Penn State University, at the School of Art & Architecture. I’m posting it here (as a PDF file) for anyone who hasn’t had enough of this sort of thing.

[continued…]

Chip Kidd To Present Bat-Manga! for the First Time Anywhere at the MoCCA Art Fest 2008

2008-06-05T23:22:00Z

JUST ANNOUNCED: Chip Kidd will present Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan (in stores October 28) for the first time anywhere this Sunday, June 8, at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Gallery in New York City as part of the MoCCA Art Festival 2008. Says Chip: “The story of how this project came together is as amazing as the stories themselves in the book. The work is a great cross-pop-cultural convergence that was nearly lost to history, plus it’s just so damned beautiful. Come and see the Batman you loved as a kid, fighting Godzilla!”

Free promotional eight-page previews of the book will be available for signing. Also, immediately after the Bat-Manga! presentation, Chip will host a panel with cartoonist David Heatley on his forth-coming book My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down.

More details, downloadable posters, and other cool stuff after the jump…

[continued…]

Jacket and Book Design for Dave Gibbons, Chip Kidd, Mike Essl’s Watching the Watchmen (2008)

2008-06-05T21:47:00Z

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah! Dinner with Sir Paul.

2008-06-03T01:37:01Z

So on Memorial Day weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a dinner in New Haven, honoring the honorary degree recipients at Yale. One of which was…the cute Beatle. The only reason I was invited was as arm-candy for Sandy (a rhyme!), because he was on the selection committee. I didn’t really think that I’d get any face time with Him, but as luck would have it, he arrived at the end of the cocktail hour just as The Whiffenpoofs were about to be introduced and the logistics of making proper space for them literally pushed PM in front of me. Or rather, his back was right in front of me.

Pictures and such after the jump…

[continued…]

Announcing artbreak. Video Contest #1.

2008-05-27T14:36:00Z

As you may have seen on our artbreak MySpace, Mars and I have posted two more songs from Wonderground—“Falstart” and “Trees.” These are very different from the others. “Falstart” is more blues-rock call-to-arms, and “Trees” is a sort of alt-folk lullaby about the apocalypse. Plus there’s an updated version of “Asymmetrical Girl,” the video of which should be finished in a month or two (hey, everyone’s donating their services on it, which means it gets done when it gets done).

Which brings me to the point of this post. Our goal is to finish the album this summer and do a pressing of it ourselves with the video included, to be available through the site. So I got to thinking, I’d like to see what any of you budding video-designer-directors out there would do with one of these songs.

[continued…]

Cover for TIME Magazine’s TIME 100 (Vol. 171 No. 19) issue (2008)

2008-05-09T16:46:00Z

Inner Cover for TIME Magazine’s TIME 100 (Vol. 171 No. 19) issue (2008)

2008-05-09T15:46:00Z

God Is a Graphic Designer?

2008-05-08T15:53:00Z

Okay, Dreamlets, I’ll admit that as far as I’m concerned the jury’s still out on the whole “higher power” thing, but when something like this happens it sure tips the scales in that direction.

Below you’ll find a couple of images of the front page of my copy of The New York Times, exactly as it arrived on my doorstop this morning. I honestly didn’t even notice it until I was on the subway to work. The photo is of the inauguration of the new Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev, with out-going president Vladimir Putin at his side.

Now, there’s been no small speculation that DM’s election is a sham and that he is merely a Putin-puppet. So, it truly boggles the mind that the paper could have been ripped this particular way, and that the story on page three underneath could have that headline.

[continued…]

Stacked Deck.

2008-05-06T04:36:00Z

Just a quick note to welcome Dean Allen, ZeFrank, and Aviary to The DECK. Oh, and I almost forgot: us!

The DECK is the world’s “premier network for reaching creative, web and design professionals,” and Good Is Dead. is proud to join its ranks right alongside the likes of such must-read sites as Design Observer, kottke.org, clusterflock, The Morning News, Daring Fireball, Textism… The list is so long, there’re just too many to include ’em all here (twenty-two too many, apparently).

I had planned to say something specific about the three other sites just joining with us, but a certain Mr. Zeldman said it far too eloquently for me to bother (and he said a few nice things about our Mr. Kidd as well). So, thanks to him; welcome to Textism, ZeFrank, and Aviary; and please: Support our sponsors!

[continued…]

Clipping: The 2008 TIME 100 Finalists

2008-04-17T05:27:00Z

Okay, so, Chip is a finalist for the 2008 TIME 100, TIME magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in, well, the world. This is the ‘con’ portion of Chip’s mini-profile on the TIME 100 page:

As is often the case with replicable success, Kidd’s book-jacket dominance is provoking backlash. (Updike has called his stuff “monstrously ugly.") Soon, he’ll be the orthodoxy some new Kidd will rebel against.

Is it just me, or is that just as much a pro as it is a con? Either way, please go vote for Chip. Barack Obama, Bono, Steven Colbert, George Clooney, The Pope, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are pretty stiff competition, ya know?

[read “The 2008 TIME 100 Finalists” in its entirety…]

Chip Kidd To Sign Autographs at New York’s Comic Con 2008.

2008-04-14T19:34:00Z

JUST ANNOUNCED: Chip will be signing autographs, along with the likes of Alex Ross, Howard Zinn, Chris Carter, Terry Brooks, Stan Lee, Frank Miller, and many more, at the New York Comic Con this weekend at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC. Chip’s appearance will be from 2 to 4pm, Saturday, April 19, at table 8.

[continued…]

Dr. Alan C. Elms on The Learners.

2008-04-14T17:28:00Z

In a correspondence begun in the comments of his last journal entry, Chip has been discussing the depiction of Stanley Milgram and his obedience experiment in The Learners with none other than Dr. Milgram’s first graduate assistant, Dr. Alan C. Elms. We reprint for you below Dr. Elms’s fascinating take on The Learners, Dr. Milgram, New Haven in the ’60s, girls at Penn State, and much more:

Hello, Chip Kidd—

I was dubious when I first heard about The Learners, but now I’ve read it and I found it to be great fun. And with a moral as well!

As I mentioned in my brief first note to you, I was Stanley Milgram’s full-time research assistant during the first several months of the obedience research. After Stanley’s untimely death, I became a sort of go-to historical witness to the research, and although I have continued to do my own research in a quite different area (psychobiography), I keep an eye on what people are saying about obedience. Understandably, there has been a recent surge in interest in the psychology of obedience to destructive authority. Your approach was intriguing, and I was happy to find that you had done your homework…

[continued…]

Clipping: Birnbaum v. Chip Kidd

2008-04-05T20:51:00Z

Chip and Robert Birnbaum chat for the fourth or fifth or eleventh time in The Morning News:

RB: […] How much of yourself is invested in The Learners so that you will be spending time out in the hustings doing publicity?

CK: A lot.

RB: You want to sell it as a movie?

CK: Um, sure.

RB: Do you want to make the movie?

CK: That’s a good question. Yeah. [laughs]

RB: You haven’t made any movies?

CK: No, that thing I just put on You Tube was my first go. What an auspicious beginning. The one nice thing about this book is that it got sold as an audio book, which you would think, “Oh, that’s a given.” But The Cheese Monkeys didn’t, and that I was very disappointed at. But then this firm, Blackstone Audio, got The Learners and I said, “That’s great, would you take a look at The Cheese Monkeys, please?” They did, and bought that also. They hired an actor named Bronson Pinchot to do it. He was on a sitcom in the late ’80s called Perfect Strangers. He played a Russian immigrant, cousin to Mark Linn-Baker. He read it, and he has become my new best friend. He’s really, really into it. He also said this would be a great little independent film—it wouldn’t be hard to make. “You should direct it. You write a like a director, bladdy blah.” The Cheese Monkeys has been in development hell for years.

[read “Birnbaum v. Chip Kidd” in its entirety…]

Insert Some Clever Entry Title That ISN’T “When You Are Engulfed in Design Revisions” Here.

2008-04-03T16:45:00Z

I suppose I could have called it that, but it wouldn’t have been fair—to David, or the book. Anyway, here’s the jacket for Mr. Sedaris’s new collection of essays, to be released next month. [Jacket image after the jump.]

[continued…]

Jacket for David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)

2008-04-03T16:42:00Z

Clipping: Three Artists walk in to a bar

2008-03-20T06:58:00Z

Directly, this has nothing to do with Chip Kidd. But the tangential relationships are too much fun to pass up. Cartoonist Evan Shaner has answered the question, “What if Charles Schulz created the Watchmen?” Follow the link to read more and to see a larger, uncropped version of the image:

[read “Three Artists walk in to a bar” in its entirety…]

Clipping: The Learners

2008-03-20T06:19:00Z

Zack Handlen has a quick Learners review over at The Onion:

The body of this review is formatted in three paragraphs, which should be read left to right, top to bottom. At the head of the body are bolded lines that delineate the author’s name, the title of the book being reviewed, and the publisher. These should be seen first. A letter grade, also in bold, is at the foot of the body, and should be seen last. This gives the impression that the grade is the conclusion of the text which precedes it. All this would matter to Happy, the graphic-designer hero of The Learners, for whom “the world [is] one great big problem to solve,” a search for the perfect match between form and content. But lately, content has been giving him some serious problems. Something is wrong with Happy, something is wrong with his life, and he can’t fix it, no matter what typeface he sets it in.

[read “The Learners” in its entirety…]

Clipping: Living with Music: A Playlist by Chip Kidd

2008-03-19T18:11:00Z

The top ten songs that Chip’s listening to this month grace the virtual pages of The New York Times:

7) New World, by Bjork, from the album “Selma Songs,’”which she wrote for Lars Von Trier’s movie “Dancer In The Dark.” This is the great movie musical finale that was never in a movie-what’s truly odd is that the CD version of the song doesn’t appear in the film itself. Instead she sings a strained a cappella version of it as she’s being hanged to death, having been wrongly convicted of murder. Cue the orchestra! Roll the credits!

[read “Living with Music: A Playlist by Chip Kidd” in its entirety…]

Clipping: Chip Kidd (BSS #185)

2008-03-15T18:09:00Z

Chip on The Bat Segundo Show discussing form, content, possibly imagined allusions, typefaces, Quark, line-lengths and margins, five-space tabs, &c., for a good forty-five minutes:

Correspondent: First off, one of the interesting discoveries I made when reading The Learners was learning that the protagonist of The Cheese Monkeys actually had a name. All of a sudden he has been named Happy, and I’m wondering what brought about this naming. Is it a matter of him kind of going out into the world; is it a kind of Death of a Salesman homage, or what’s the deal with that?
Kidd: Well, I will sort of embarrassingly ask, did you read The Cheese Monkeys?

[read “Chip Kidd (BSS #185)” in its entirety…]

Clipping: Annual Report—Part One

2008-03-11T04:30:00Z

Our very own Mr. Kidd is the author of this week’s serialized, five-part short story, “Annual Report” over at Five Chapters. Part One hits the web today, with Parts Two, Three, Four, and Five appearing one per day for the rest of the week:

To Our Shareholders:

Well, what can I say? This past year, this catastrophic year to end all years—the year that felled mighty corporations like Amazonian rainforests, the year that turned the hot salt tears of countless corrupt and convicted CEOs into America’s drink of choice—this, this was our best year ever. Ever! Our stock is at an all-time high and continues to climb, while all around us kisses the abyss.We are the David to the world’s Goliath, the cute new girlfriend of this wrinkled and weathered country, the Cinderella of the stock exchange. And I, your leader, owe it all to you. Or rather, to us—we happy few (apologies, William) who understood from the start my dream, my vision, you who saw fit to generate the capitol necessary to give bloody, screaming birth to this business three short years ago.

[read “Annual Report—Part One” in its entirety…]

Clipping: Observed: Martin Amis Misprinted

2008-03-11T04:19:00Z

It’s the UK cover—which wasn’t designed by Chip—but it’s funny and tangentially related, so it’s wound up here.

Design Observer has a funny shot of a misprinted version of the new Martin Amis novel:

The Second Plane is the new Martin Amis novel. Seems the printer got confused by the title while printing. (Thanks to Christopher Raymond.) [WD]

[read “Observed: Martin Amis Misprinted” in its entirety…]

Clipping: Chip Kidd Walks Fast and Likes a Stiff Drink

2008-03-10T14:03:00Z

Daily Intelligencer has 21 Questions with our very own Mr. Kidd:

In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job?
I mainly surf eBay, porn, MySpace, the Drudge Report, and Ain’t It Cool News, all punctuated by fits of designing book covers.

[read “Chip Kidd Walks Fast and Likes a Stiff Drink” in its entirety…]

Clipping: ‘Learners’ looks good, reads better

2008-03-10T04:25:01Z

A nice, if short, review from Lisa McLendon in today’s Wichita Eagle:

“The Learners” certainly is a well-designed book: eye-catching cover, clean look, clever use of typography to make points within the story. But the question comes down to form versus content: Can the designer write? Happily for readers, this one can.

[read “‘Learners’ looks good, reads better” in its entirety…]

Clipping: The Medium and the Message

2008-03-09T06:16:00Z

James Poniewozik has a full-page review in this week’s New York Times Book Review. It’s somewhat negative:

“The Learners” is witty and well observed as an office comedy, as a meditation on art and as a story of self-discovery. But it rings false when Kidd aims for themes of greater tragedy; when Happy comes to a dark self-realization after participating in the Milgram experiment (in which most subjects gave the “learners” the maximum jolt), his reaction often plays more like an adolescent funk than the genuine crisis of the soul Kidd seems to aim for. Kidd’s ad agency characters and associates are broadly drawn — with delightful Dickensian names, like the portly client representative Dick Stankey, who “sweats like a roasting ham hock” — but they undercut the novel’s realism. And while the book is packed with sharp insights, Kidd subverts them with overemphasis. “The cliché is that dead people look like they’re sleeping. They don’t. That’s a lie. Sleeping people vibrate despite themselves, with the ever-present promise of reanimation” — an absolutely gorgeous perception marred by the double-exclamation-point insistence of “that’s a lie.”

One can’t peg the novel’s shortcomings on Word or Image, though. Kidd ultimately is a brilliant, self-aware designer and a clever writer. Where “The Learners” fails, when it does, is in character development, tone, affect — all those intangibles that are neither Form nor Content, but are conjured up by the interplay of the two.

But mostly positive:

For an Image guy, Kidd has infectious fun with words. “Some people spoke volumes,” Happy says of Tip, his glib co-worker. “Tip spoke leaflets.”

…

Still, the book’s charms are, literally and figuratively, in the details: the visual observations, the comedy of the office’s small-stakes battles and the meditations on Kidd’s own graphic art, which at their best moments serve his protagonist’s character as well. In one touching passage, Happy lays out examples on the page of all the ways one can typeset the words “Forgive me,” but concludes that typography “has its limits like everything else.” In another novel, it might seem like showy metafictional playing around. In “The Learners,” it’s a sweet, small reminder of how words — and type — can fail us.

The nytimes.com version of the review also includes the first chapter¹ of The Learners in its entirety. Nice.

¹Okay, that’s what they’re calling it: the first chapter. The book, of course, doesn’t have chapters. So let’s say it’s the first couple scenes of The Learners. Well, except that it skips the little prologue, “We’ll Be Right Back, After This” bit. So let’s call them the first couple scenes of the novel proper. Hokay?

[read “The Medium and the Message” in its entirety…]

Clipping: The Learners

2008-03-08T05:33:00Z

Jonathan Gibbs has a tiny review in today’s Financial Times:

The retro detailing is lovingly rendered, the humour sharp and catty…Always intriguing, this is a strange mixture of the frivolous and the disturbing.

[read “The Learners” in its entirety…]

Clipping: Reflecting on manipulation

2008-03-08T05:12:00Z

Ian McGillis has some interesting things to say in his nicely slightly lengthy Learners review:

Certainly, readers familiar with, say, any early Tom Wolfe book, will have no accessibility issues. More pertinent is how Kidd uses his fiction to explore the roots and broader implications of his work in the modern industry of persuasion.

…

Kidd pulls it off. He’s able to do it because he makes his point in the context of a classic coming-of-age narrative set in a specific time and place rendered convincingly surreal. That narrative shows every sign of being ongoing, but even if we don’t get to find out how Happy fares among the flower children, Kidd has held up an engrossing distorting mirror to a time when marketplace language we all now speak was only just being coined.

[read “Reflecting on manipulation” in its entirety…]

Jacket for Chip Kidd, Geoff Spear, Saul Ferris’s Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan (2008)

2008-03-07T07:35:00Z

Jacket for David Shields’s The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (2008)

2008-03-07T07:33:01Z

Jacket for Augusten Burroughs’s A Wolf at the Table (2008)

2008-03-07T07:32:00Z

Jacket for Paul Simon’s Lyrics: 1964–2006 (2008)

2008-03-07T07:28:01Z

Trade Cover for David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice (2008)

2008-03-07T07:10:00Z

Cover for Tony Millionaire’s Drinky Crow's Maakies Treasury (2008)

2008-03-07T07:01:00Z

Jacket for Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, Peter W. Kunhardt Jr.’s Looking for Lincoln (2008)

2008-03-07T06:57:00Z

Jacket for Stefan Kanfer’s Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando (2008)

2008-03-07T06:47:00Z

Jacket for Brian Greene’s Icarus at the Edge of Time (2008)

2008-03-07T06:41:00Z

Logo for DC Comics, Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis (2008)

2008-03-07T06:25:00Z

Jacket for Jackson R. Bryer and Robin Wilder’s The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (2008)

2008-03-07T06:19:00Z

Jakcet for Martin Amis’s The Second Plane—September 11: Terror and Boredom (2008)

2008-03-07T06:18:00Z

Clipping: Not quite honor roll material

2008-03-07T05:42:00Z

Christoph Mark has one of the more negative Learners reviews to date (though, oddly, he admits to possibly having misunderstood the novel’s content):

“Antissapointment." This nonexistent yet highly useful word, which refers to the feeling you get when you know that something you are anticipating will ultimately be disappointing can, unfortunately, describe at least to some extent graphic designer and author Chip Kidd’s second novelistic outing, The Learners.

Though the follow-up to 2001’s The Cheese Monkeys is funny, insightful and even educational, its greatest contribution to the world, with any luck, will be the aforementioned word. I fear, however, that the word will fester in obscurity as the eyes of readers who have no real interest in the intricacies of graphic design gloss over Kidd’s detailed accounts of typographical concepts such as typeface, fonts and leading. (For people who do have an interest in this, on the other hand, it’s actually quite witty.)

…

Also ironic--and back to the graphic design again--are the numerous unexplainable typographic errors throughout the book. Normally, I would probably ignore this. But this is Chip. Kidd. He designed the book himself (and also books by John Updike and Michael Crichton, to name a few of his big-name clients) and covers the subject of typography throughout, but there are countless double-spaces and double-tabs, as well as weirdly justified lines.

This being said, maybe I’ve misunderstood the content hidden by the form. Maybe a second, third or fourth read will reveal something new. But I fear not. By no means a complete disappointment, The Learners, unfortunately, did not live up to my expectations or Kidd’s potential.

[read “Not quite honor roll material” in its entirety…]

Clipping: Chip Kidd: The Learners

2008-03-06T05:39:01Z

Design Observer has what is now a third available excerpt of the new novel (including one of the ad designs from the book).

[read “Chip Kidd: The Learners” in its entirety…]

A Concerned Message from Mrs. Kidd (Chip’s Mom).

2008-03-05T02:39:00Z

Hello, dears.

Now, I know you all are busy as all get-out, but what sort of mother would I be if I sat idly by and just watched what was going on and didn’t ask you all to help. Sweeties, Chippy wouldn’t dream of bringing this up, but as a concerned parent and frequent web-browser, I couldn’t help but notice that so far on Amazon there is one, count it, one customer review of The Learners. And, it’s, well, let’s just say that it’s not exactly the cat’s whiskers. More like something from the cat’s other end, pardon me for saying.

[continued…]

Clipping: ‘Mad Men’: The Novel

2008-03-03T06:44:00Z

Amid Capeci’s big-time, full-page, Newsweek review of The Learners hits newsstands March 3:

“The Learners,” like the AMC drama “Mad Men,” is the latest to exploit the ironic parallels between our time and another era where new technology and restless twenty-somethings were looking forward not back. Set in the months after another presidential election about “change,” the ad men at Spear, Rakoff and Ware can see the sans serif writing on the wall, especially an advertising director named Sketch, who spends hours painstakingly rendering inked drawings of giant, smiling potato chips while silently despairing about the rumors of changing Krinkle Kutt ads to feature photography. “It used to be a gentleman’s business,” says one copywriter. “Now it’s a horse orgy!” If they could only see how big the orgy’s gotten now.

[read “‘Mad Men’: The Novel” in its entirety…]

Clipping: ‘The Learners’ by Chip Kidd

2008-03-02T06:00:00Z

Another big-time review, this time from the LA Times’ Edward Champion:

The graphical shock value is more subtle this time, but Kidd amps up his knack for wild description. Happy describes how his “pulse went from 45 to 78 rpm.” A co-worker carries “the most astonishing contradiction of components I’d ever encountered.” A woman passes the time “roasting under a Promethean hair dryer.” Happy hears “the rapid-fire click of high heels, angry on the linoleum floor,” an awkward juxtaposition that may cause some readers to be on the lookout for sentient stilettos. There are PAPS! and PLUNKS! scattered throughout and more typefaces than in a street sweeper’s pile of fliers on a Sunday morning.

…

Kidd loses momentum in the book’s third section. As Happy tries to get his bearings after the experiment, the imagery remains somewhat vivid but takes on a slightly more pedestrian form ("the mosquito drone of the TV test pattern"). And when Happy’s breakdown is offset by the contrapuntal remedy of advertising slogans—“[p]seudo-haikus of whimsical, doomed hope,” as he describes them—it comes across as belabored. Snags are inevitable when it comes to form versus function, but Kidd’s quirky approach to life is endearingly recognizable in its expression.

[read “‘The Learners’ by Chip Kidd” in its entirety…]

Don’t Cry for Me, O, Nebraska.

2008-03-01T17:06:00Z

It’s Saturday morning, March 1 (where did February go???!!), and I’m sitting in my living room in NYC, typing this, and I feel guilty. Like I’m playing hooky from school, which I never ever did, being the good little boy that I was. As per yesterday’s post, the plan was to fly from Minneapolis to Omaha in order to give a presentation to AIGA Nebraska that evening (last night), then return home tonight. The problem turned out to be trying to get there via Chicago, which by now should universally be recognized as the new Bermuda Triangle of flight schedules.

[continued…]

So Much for the Orange Alert Level.

2008-02-29T23:17:00Z

Okay, so I’m going through security this morning at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport, in order to board for Omaha, the last stop on this leg of the tour. I wearily stuff everything in the appropriate tubs and send them through the conveyor belt, pad through the metal detector, and begin to collect my things on the other side. Then a doughy but pleasant attendant picks up the tub with my corduroy hunting coat in it and asks if it’s mine. I say it is indeed and he asks to inspect it further. I say of course (what else?). As he is gingerly going through my inside right breast pocket, where I keep all my signing pens, he removes what appears to be a bright red thin marker.

“Is this yours?”

But I don’t have a bright red thin marker. I do, however, have a bright red thin . . . exacto knife. Which I had put there weeks ago and forgot about. Which he is holding now with thumb and forefinger. Oh, goodness.

[continued…]

Clipping: Comic novelist combines design with infamous experiments

2008-02-27T06:21:00Z

Minnesota Public Radio has four clips from Chip’s All Things Considered interview (unfortunately in realPlayer format only), including an excerpt from The Learners read by our Mr. Kidd, himself. All four clips are certainly worth your time, but the best one is ’Kidd talks about his dislike at being called a graphic design rock star‘:

Q: You have been described as the rock star—
A: Hmm.

Q: —[laughs] as you roll your eyes—
A: Excruciating.

Q: —the rock star of graphic design. Well what does that actually mean?
A: You know what it means? It means that USA Today said it, that it got sort of picked up and put into any and all press releases of anything I’ve ever done, and just sort of like sent out into the ether, and everybody quotes that. It’s amazing.

Q: But, it must help, in some ways…
A: How?

[read “Comic novelist combines design with infamous experiments” in its entirety…]

Clipping: Chip Kidd’s The Learners Reviewed Glowingly in Newsweek

2008-02-27T06:15:00Z

Stephanie at UnBeige has a review of Newsweek’s big review (how’s that for meta?) of The Learners which includes a delicious quote from none other than Debbie Millman:

I think you know what you’ve crossed over into ‘real’ fame when you have a full page in Newsweek.

[read “Chip Kidd’s The Learners Reviewed Glowingly in Newsweek” in its entirety…]

Clipping: ‘Learners’ informs and gets laughs

2008-02-27T05:00:00Z

Big-time positive review today from Robert Bianco in USA Today (and who cares if the cover art they used isn’t the final? We certainly don’t):

[For] readers unfamiliar with Chip Kidd or type fonts and graphic design, his book offers an enjoyable introduction to another world and a major writing talent.

…

Kidd has a number of goals and tricks in mind, and some of them do clash.

But unlike many contemporary comic novelists, he’s smart enough to tie his new-fangled gimmicks to some old-fashioned virtues: sympathetic characters, funny lines, a firm grasp of time and place, and a plot that makes surprising shifts without ever losing its way.

[read “‘Learners’ informs and gets laughs” in its entirety…]

Jacket and Book Design for Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997)

2008-02-26T04:44:00Z

Jacket for Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2005)

2008-02-26T04:34:01Z

Jacket for Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes (1993)

2008-02-26T04:30:00Z

Jacket for Brad Meltzer’s Dead Even (1998)

2008-02-26T04:16:00Z

Trade Cover for Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show (1999)

2008-02-26T04:13:00Z

Jacket for Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006)

2008-02-26T04:09:00Z

Jacket for J. D. McClatchy’s Twenty Questions (1998)

2008-02-26T04:06:01Z

Jacket for J. D. McClatchy’s Ten Commandments (1998)

2008-02-26T03:42:00Z

Jacket for Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (1994)

2008-02-26T03:40:00Z

Jacket for Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain (1998)

2008-02-26T03:37:01Z

Jacket for Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992)

2008-02-26T03:33:00Z

Trade Cover and Book Design for Chip Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys (2002)

2008-02-26T03:16:00Z

Clipping: Three Answers: Chip Kidd

2008-02-25T12:37:00Z

PW: How did author Chip like designer Chip’s finished product for The Learners?

CK: Oh, the jury’s still out. I think author Chip thinks it’s just fine. It’s funny: I have a great art director at Scribner, and when I first sent him the basic scheme of what I wanted, he said, “Obviously we’re going to get behind whatever you want to do. But as a book cover designer and a fan, I would like to see you push this much, much farther.” And while I appreciated that impulse and understood it, I sort of had to rein him in. He works with authors like Stephen King and Don Delillo and I had to remind him that I’m very clearly not at their level. In my mind you can take far more chances with a Stephen King blockbuster than you can with little unprolific Chip Kidd’s second novel.

[read “Three Answers: Chip Kidd” in its entirety…]

Jacket for Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005)

2008-02-24T21:27:00Z

Catalogue Cover for Ellen Lupton’s Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture (1996)

2008-02-24T21:24:00Z

Jacket for Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies (1995)

2008-02-24T21:20:00Z

Jacket for Bia Lowe’s Wild Ride: Earthquakes, Sneezes and Other Thrills (1995)

2008-02-24T21:16:00Z

Jacket for Michael Lewis’s The New New Thing (1999)

2008-02-24T21:12:00Z

Trade Cover for Elmore Leonard’s Glitz (1998)

2008-02-24T21:10:00Z

Jacket for John LeCarré’s The Night Manager (1993)

2008-02-24T21:05:00Z

Jacket for Richard Lattimore’s The New Testament (1996)

2008-02-24T20:57:00Z