Chip Kidd on book design at TYPOBerlin 09 “Space”

I was lucky to talk and interview the creative designer Chip Kidd at TYPOBerlin 2009. He shared his mischievous outlook on creativity with the audience and his talk was genuinely rocking – thanks to his musical as well as his graphic talents! It was a pleasure to talk with him and his portrait photo is one of the best editorial ones I took.

Is it possible books will become all electronic format, and would this make good design possibilities, or would you hate the idea?

I hate the idea. People have been trying to make this a reality for over ten years, and it hasn’t happened yet. Certainly with the music industry it happened almost overnight, and that says to me that people still want to read physical books. But at the same time what I worry about is that if it gets to the point where people don’t have a choice anymore, if you don’t give people a choice they can only choose one thing. So I don’t want that to happen! I think as long as people are free to choose which format they want, the book will be fine, the book will still exist.

How deeply do you have to know a book before you can design a succesful cover?

You have to feel like you have a deep, good understanding of it. Whether you have to spend a lot of time with it in order for that to happen depends on what the book is and depends on what your knowledge about the subject matter is or whatever the book is about. Usually I have to read the manuscript in order to get a good idea of what to do. I think one of the benefits of having done this for almost 24 years now is that if you’re still passionate about it you bring a lot of experience to the process, so decisions that it would have taken you a couple of days to figure out when you were in your 20s… Now I’m in my 40s and I feel like I know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work, and yet I still have to be aware of doing something that is new and hopefully original and that is exciting.

Do you like to discuss the book with the author beforehand?

Absolutely. I think it’s the best way to work. Some publishers don’t want you to do that. They want to very much control the process – they want to literally come between you and the author, and I can sort of understand that because they’re the publisher, they’re paying the money and they want to make sure that they have control of the process. But as a designer, when you do a book jacket you have several clients – the publisher, the author, you may also have the author’s agent and then you have an art director, so you’ve got all these different people to please. And then you have the reader – and that’s very important. But it all starts with the author. The author sat and wrote this book, and having written several novels myself, it helps me understand how much emotionally they have invested in what they’re doing. Some authors are very visually astute, a lot of them are not, they can only react to what you’re showing them, but I at least like to have a discussion with the author, just about what they’re expecting and what they were thinking when they wrote it. It’s often very, very helpful. It never hurts to know more about it.

Can a great design add a deeper layer of meaning to the book?

It can certainly add a deeper layer of meaning to the cover! There’s only so much a cover can do. It can imply that there’s a deeper layer of meaning, as in not trying to literally depict what’s in the book. I think the best covers do have a certain air of mystery to them, there should be a puzzle that the reader needs to solve. It’s hard to do that every time but I do try! But in terms of bringing a deeper level to the book itself, not really. There’s only so much a cover can do.

Is it important for you as a designer to work ethically? Are there books or writers you would refuse to work with?

Yes, there are plenty of authors I would refuse to work with, mostly the sort of political pundit types who are trying to get people to think a certain way, people I truly hate like Bill O’Reilly or Ann Coulter, neo-conservative hate-mongers, but, for whatever reason I don’t get asked to do books like that! Because, I think, people know better than to ask me to do something like that! Do I think graphic designers should work ethically? Yes, I do, although I sympathise with people who have to do work because they need the money – that’s a very real consideration. Somebody is going to take on that package to design cigarettes, because someone has to do it and they get paid – maybe they even smoke, you know. I feel very lucky as a designer that I don’t get put in that position. I mean, they’re books. It’s one thing to design a cover for a novel that’s not very good, it’s another thing to design a cover for a book that’s trying to teach people to think in a bad way. So I feel very privileged that I don’t have to do that.

What books or authors would you like most to design for?

This fall I will be designing – well, I’ve designed it already, but this fall, one of my great dreams has come true and I’ve designed a first edition by Vladimir Nabokov, and it’s the last thing that he was working on when he died. It’s not really a novel, it’s notes for a novel, and these notes were on note-cards, 138 note cards, and it’s a really controversial project, because he had asked his son on his deathbed to burn it, and the son did not, and it sat in a safe in Switzerland for about 30 years, and it was finally decided to let the world see them. So technically it’s the first edition, it’s the last first edition of Nabokov. It’s very exciting for me.

What have you learned about the business side of design?

Frankly I’m really the worst business person in the world. On the one hand I feel that I do well enough, that I do just fine, I feel that I get well compensated for what I do, I love what I do, I own my own home in Manhattan, but I just make it up as I go along. I’m not saying that other people should do that, but that’s just what works for me. I hate dealing with money, I hate negotiating about it. Some people thrive on it, I don’t. I would rather just get to the work and do the work because the work is what interests me. The one thing that I do feel very strongly about – and most graphic designers won’t be able to do much about this – but one thing that I recognised very early on when designing book covers is to get personal credit for everything I did. That’s really the only reason I’m sitting here and you’re sitting there. It’s that my name goes on everything I do, and I’m very lucky that way. Most graphic designers are anonymous. So my advice business-wise, is that if it’s at all conceiveably possible, get credit for what you do. Because that’s how you build up a reputation, and that’s how you get people to seek you out for work, as opposed to the other way round.

What do you say to young designers starting out today?

Good luck! I have a couple of stock answers… I would recommend learning to write. It surprises me constantly, but I see a lot of different graphic design programmes all over the world and almost none of them have any kind of concentration on writing. And I feel that it can only help you by learning how to articulate your thoughts in a coherent manner, on paper. You need to know how to say, cogently, what you want to say. And that’s what graphic design is, it’s sending a message. Whether that means taking a writing course, or self-teaching it, which is sort of what I did, I really think it’s important. Learning to write will help your graphic design, because it’s communicating.

What inspires you right now?

I’m inspired by what ever I’m working on. I’m working on anything between 10 and 20 projects at a time. So that’s what my brain is working on. There’s a certain amount of anxiety about having too much to work on, but it’s not nearly as bad as not having enough. So, for example, I have to design a cover for a factual book Hostage Nation about kidnappings in Colombia related to the drug trade. It will come out in about a year. So I’m trying to learn as much about that as I can, because I haven’t really worked on a project that dealt with that before. So what does that mean, how do you depict it, in what way, with what kind of tone…? So, I’m inspired by what I have to work on.