Type 2 (due Jan 20)

Chip Kidd is a designer, editor, and writer. For this particular project he is important because he has designed over 1000 book covers but still manages to keep each one unique. When I looked at his work I was surprised (and pleased) to note that he doesn’t seem to have a defining style. By keeping each cover true to the book it represents but still interesting in its own right he avoids repetitive or tedious work.

John Gall is the Vice President and Art Director for Vintage and Anchor Books. The reason he is important to us is because with his designs he is able to “convey the essence of the book in a unique and surprising way that maybe pushes the design envelope a bit.” Both John Gall and Chip Kidd are very good at mixing an interesting amount of unexpectedness in their designs. The content is recognizable enough for the viewer to understand it, but there is something there that captures the attention after the first glance and keeps it from being boring.

Definitions: I couldn’t find where the first two were in the readings, but I gave them a good old college try...

series – several books that are all connected, but don’t necessarily depend on the others; deal with the same world, time period, characters, similar themes, etc.

sequence – several books that have an obvious order for reading them, usually chronological

sign – things that have some sort of pattern and meaning; something that represents something else; there are many types of signs: they can be visual, verbal, literal, non-literal, etc.; a picture of a person represents them, a map represents a particular area, an apple can represent temptation…

index – there is a physical or cause and effect relationship between the sign and what it represents, viewer/reader can understand what caused something by seeing the result or can anticipate the result by seeing/reading a particular event; the timer on the microwave going off means the popcorn is done

symbol – non-literal relationship to what is being symbolized, entirely based on conventions; a set of scales represents justice

Interesting book covers:

John Gall

Chip Kidd

Henry Sene Yee

David Drummond

Chip Kidd

Indexing:

Bodies: the drawing of the person was half erassed as can be seen by the left over erasser crumbs

A Perfect Mess: the crooked lampshade means that someone must have bumped it (well, the would have if it were real…)

Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance: someone diliberately cutout/digitally removed the seccond “l” in the word “small”

Everything you always wanted to know, but were too afraid to ask...

I am allergic to Vicodin and this man.