Continuing our countdown to the HOW Design Live conference, the Print team searched through our back issues so we could pay homage to Chip Kidd, who will be giving an intimate portrait of his work in “Under the Covers with Chip Kidd.” The legendary book designer and associate art director for Alfred A. Knopf has crafted some of the most memorable jackets and covers of recent decades. The opportunity to hear him talk is special (and if you bring along some of your favorite Kidd-designed titles, you can probably convince him to autograph one). So, without further delay, register for the conference—and use the code PRNT12 to get a 10 percent discount (more info on that below).
Kidd is equally at home in many arenas. He designs seminal covers for big publishing houses, and for small publishers as well. He is editor-at-large for Pantheon. And he is eminently accomplished in his own right as an author. Yeah, he’s our idol, too. We’ll be in Boston to see him live. Will you join us?
Kidd has been featured in Print for his book designs, and we’ve reviewed the books he’s authored over the years; Julie Lasky reviewed The Cheese Monkeys, and Steven Heller critiqued Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986-2006.Kidd himself has written for the magazine, contributing a prescient profile of the comics artist Chris Ware in 1997, when the latter was merely a glint in Comic-Con’s eye. And he wrote for Print about his own work in a tell-all from 1995:
Where I work, we produce stories for a living. We buy them from people who make them up (or gather them, because some of the stories are actually true). We turn them into objects. And then we sell them. My part in this operation is to figure out what some of the stories are going to look like, and how the unsuspecting consumer will perceive them for the first time.As jobs go, it’s a pretty good one compared to selling luggage and hoagies, which is what I used to do. However, it does have its dark and tear-stained days. When enough ideas get rejected, Samsonite and cheese-steaks can seem like loving friends. The trick is to see every defeat as an opportunity to do something even better than you did it in the first place, and then actually find someone to appreciate it. By now, we have turned rejection, if not into an art form, at least into a way of life.
For more insight and inspiration straight from Kidd, sign up for the conference and his talk, which judging by Kidd’s own description, will be memorable. (He promises that one takeaway will be “a wad of moist tissue.”) If you’ve already registered, celebrate!
The discount code PRNT12 is good for 10 percent off the regular individual full conference rates for HOW Design Conference, InHOWse Managers Conference, the Dieline Package Design Conference, or Creative Freelancer Conference. It cannot be combined with other discount offers.
Here, and below: Covers Kidd has designed for the publisher Vertical Inc.
