Chip Kidd –“Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.”

At TED, Chip Kidd who is a clever book cover designer talks about book cover design.
He has devoted over 25 years to design book covers at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Also he is a 2014 AIGA medalist.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chip_kidd_designing_books_is_no_laughing_matter_ok_it_is

In his speech, he mentioned that designing book cover should be concerned to be a first impression for readers to get deep into and book cover should embody the whole story of a book. His job as book cover designer was to ask a question, “What do the stories look like?” He says a book cover designer is an interpreter of the story.

He picked up some of his work in his speech. I picked up one of them here, the cover of “IQ1984” by Haruki Murakami. The story is about a woman named Aomame in 1984 Japan. He introduced this story that Aomame “finds herself negotiating down a spiral staircase off an elevated highway. When she gets to the bottom, she can’t help but feel that, all of a sudden, she’s entered a new reality that’s just slightly different from the one that she left, but very similar, but different.”

Then Chip Kidd and his coworkers talked about parallel planes of existence like a book jacket and the book that it covers. After some trials, they talked about different planes such as different papers. They took a semi-transparent piece of velum thinking of it as one part of the form and content. Also they tried opposite way, which was the paper board was on top of the semi-transparent paper. The book cover design came out to force readers to consider “a single person straddling two planes of existence. And the object itself invited exploration interaction, consideration and touch.”

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