Chip Kidd Quotes

A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story.

I really liked the design of Batman. I liked the concept. There's a lot more you can do with Batman than most other superheroes.

Penguin Classic, with the orange bands at the top and bottom; and the Gill Sans thirty-sixpoint title, all caps, centered and medium weight, in black on the white band in the middle. One of the designer Tschichold's prouder moments, when he finally woke the hell up and joined the twentieth century.

Limits are possibilities ... Formal restrictions, contrary to what you might think, free you up by allowing you to concentrate on purer ideas ... You can be crippled by too many choices, especially if you don't know what your goals are.

Twenty-six letters: Marjorie Morningstar or Ulysses.
The man-made world means exactly that. There isn't an inch of it that doesn't have to be dealt with, figured out, executed. And it's waiting for you to decide what it's going to look like.

My longing for someone to talk to made Himillsy the lightning bug in my honey jar. I punched holes in the lid so she could breathe.

I wouldn't buy a book simply because I like the cover. I would pick it up. The jacket can call your attention to it. But in that sense, Oprah Winfrey is worth all the jackets in the world. A jacket is basically trying to do what she does all on her own.

Did they want what I wanted?
Did they want to understand, to unlock it? To decode it? To glean, to touch, to learn, to get something, to proceed, to get somewhere, to graduate, to work, to thrive; to someday, sometime, finally earn the luxury, the permission to ... stop, to stop all of this, to relax, and forget?

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.

We are the Western World. We read, see, think. Left. To. Right. We can't help it.
..The problem with Top to Bottom is that it's unAmerican. We want to begin in the depths and climb our way upward. But our typographic system argues against this and wins, and images follow suit.
..What you have to be careful to remember about Big and Small, is that they can extend to infinity in either direction. Consider: Big can always be bigger and Small smaller. The atom is the Universe and vice versa. And they're both identical.
..Left to Right, Top to Bottom, Big and Small; on a two-dimensional plane, all of these tools rely on a relative truth. Now we come to In Front Of and In Back of, which for us are big, fat lies. Very useful though, and the first of many at your disposal.

Nothing worth knowing can ever be taught in a classroom.

I'd have to say that the things that mean the most to me are the examples of original comic art that I'm able to look at every day, most of them either by notable friends and/or for projects that I've worked on.

If you intend to die, you can do anything.

I find that the older I get, the clearer I want things to be. I think this is a natural symptom of maturation - as we age, mysteries pile up, and they're usually not the fun ones: Just how long do I have? Why do some people get what they deserve, and others don't? Why are certain problems so easy to solve, while others are totally impossible? Will they ever, ever bring working jetpacks to the marketplace?

Graphic Design for its own sake will never happen, because the concept cancels itself out - a poster about nothing other than itself is not Graphic Design, it's ... makin' ART.

But at the end of the day, you can't major in Making Stuff, so it was Art by default.

I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going, but at some point I stopped - when to keep going would seem like I was going too far.

I'm a very slow reader.

I still have a steady stream of book cover work. I'm grateful for it. Viva le book!

The thing that I came to realize was that Schulz is the great unifier. Here's the one cartoonist that pretty much everybody can agree on.

I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.

Antisappointment. Anticipation colliding head-on with the certainty of its own doom.

Kiddies, Graphic Design, if you wield it effectively, is Power. Power to transmit ideas that change everything. Power that can destroy an entire race or save a nation from despair. In this century, Germany chose to do the former with the swastika, and America opted for the latter with Mickey Mouse and Superman.

It's not Art. And Art is not Design.

I think too many comic book covers are way too busy, crammed with far too much information, both visual and verbal, that just becomes a dull noise.

Yes, Garnett Grey was an Architect. Were a psychoanalyst to approach him from behind, tap his shoulder, and say 'Humanity,' Garrett'd spin and respond, without hesitation, 'Solvable'.

After age twenty-five, you're not a victim anymore - you're a volunteer.

( ... ) photography opened up quite a little Pandora's box, kiddies. ( ... ) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence - once they became an option - they mutated ... into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.

On the first day of class, the Visual Arts building reclined before me like an old brick whore, egging me to show her one, last, good time. I doubted I was up to the task, but regardless, I entered from the rear, just to give myself the slightest mental edge.

Never let your mouth write a check that your ass can't cash.

Design is a response to a specific problem. You are given a problem to solve, and then you let the problem itself tell you what your solution is.