Chip Kidd Designer Research

So, before writing this I may have googled "25 names every graphic designer should know",  as a budding graphic designer I'm surprised that I've never properly looked at other designers in depth and studied their work. Because they're the professionals and studying them (for me at least) is a massive part of my progression. These designers are behind some of the most recognizable: book covers, branding, posters and logos. Studying their designs and processes inspires me in my own designs and gives me an insight into what works.

The first designer I came across was Chip Kidd, he's a very upbeat and inspiring designer, I first browsed his portfolio of work online and then went onto watch his TED talk about some of his book covers he's produced. One other reason I wanted to research Chip Kidd, is that in the next assignment I'm going to have to produce 3 book covers and Chip designs book covers. So it made perfect sense to research him first. His most iconic covers include Jurassic Park and the Dark Knight Returns, but I wanted to research some of his more clever book covers and ones that are just designed beautifully.

This one of the most striking book covers I've seen, its called "The Acceleration of just about everything" now I haven't read the book but I'm guessing it's about accelerating. Chip has added so much life and motion into this cover by blurring out the lettering and changing the perspective so the text isn't flat and 2 dimensional. Because of the motion blurs it very literally feels like the text is accelerating at speed. The next interesting part of the design is that it goes onto say "James Gleick, the author of CHAOS" Chip Kidd has captured the chaos element inside this jacket, firstly the whole thing is so unconventional and looks almost a mess, the blurs make some of the text less readable, which is normally not the desired outcome for a designer, also some of the letters are off the page, this further adds to it being unreadable. Also the words "author of CHAOS" is written in a very small font size and can't be seen from a far. Altogether these aspects accompany one another to portray an idea of total chaos, nothing is lined up, nothing is straight, words are blurred and parts are too small to even read. What I've taken from this jacket is that type can be manipulated to completely transform a page and be used to represent certain elements of a books name or nature. Furthermore, Chip Kidd has designed this jacket to look visually unappealing, and this technique of making something look bad on purpose is actually useful because of its actually representing chaos and speed instead of just looking 'bad'.
Another book jacket from Chip Kidd, this is for a book called Divided Kingdom. This jacket is another example of Chip Kidd taking the ideas and nature of the book and literally representing them on the page. The novel features the idea of London being divided, and Chip has taken an iconic London landmark and split it up into 24 pieces each being mixed up and manipulated, so Big Ben (representing London) is literally divided. The spacing between the pieces gives perfect space for text to be placed and in fact, the text further perceives the idea of division by also being split from each other. Also from a design point of view displaying the text on a black background makes it more readable. The boxes and the twisted shapes of Big Ben make this jacket another interesting and beautifully designed covers which perfectly represents the nature of the story through literal images.


Chip Kidd | PORTFOLIO
Chipkidd.com
http://chipkidd.com/home/portfolio-3/