Good First Impressions

This week I found inspiration from another TED Talk.  The speaker was Chip Kidd and the title was 'Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.'

 

Chip Kidd works for a book publishing company as a graphic designer.  He is responsible for the covers of many popular books.  He starts off the talk by focusing on making good first impressions.  The cover of a book needs to embody "what the story looks like".  So Kidd asks himself this question on a daily basis.  He focuses on giving the story a face that the reader will be intrigued by. 

One popular cover designed by Kidd was Jurassic Park:

 

It is a simple design, yet it tells a story while leaving the audience interested enough to open up the book.  The reason this design sparked my creativity was because the cover eventually got used for  many other things.

The next image is the design incorporated into the logo for the Jurassic Park movies.  The logo became a phenomenon in our culture.  Kidd said, "If you do your job right and get lucky, great art can be great business." The idea that a simple design from a small book cover designer can become such an extraordinary part of our culture really inspires me to dream big and have the confidence to pursue my ideas.

Kidd mentions that a book designer has an obligation to please the reader, the publisher, and the author.  A designer must create a cover that makes people say, "Wow! I want to read that."  This next cover designed by Kidd is so good, it looks real.

The cover really did fool people in the stores.  They thought the book was ruined due to the running ink.  It is interesting because although the title is 'Dry', the page looks wet.  Sometimes a designer must create something unexpected to spark a reader's interest.  This cover expands my creativity because it forces me to think outside the box and encourages me to design something unexpected.

Another way that the talk by Kidd strengthened my creativity was through the different uses that were developed for the covers.  Here is an example of a creative book cover designed by Kidd that has two uses:

This eight volume series not only has an attractive cover for each book, but when all the book are on a shelf, they come together to create a sort of poster and gives a face to the story.

The TED Talk not only focused on ways to develop creative designs, but stressed the importance of owning an actual book rather than using a Kindle or iPad.  There is an experience and comfort that is lost when using just the electronic copy of the book.  These ideas expanded my creativity by giving me a new appreciation for book covers and all the thought and detail that goes into each design.