A behind-the-scenes post about how The New York Times Magazine chooses its covers (which are exceptional).
![Just finished Chip Kidd’s Book One: Work: 1986-2006, an incredibly inspiring collection of the book covers he’s designed, along with commentary from select authors and Kidd himself. I loved it.
Among the most striking jackets of the bunch: Kidd’s design for Richmond Lattimore’s translation of The New Testament. John Updike, introducing Kidd’s collection, states that this New Testament edition “may have bombed with booksellers but in two seconds [it] achieved what Mel Gibson strived to do in two hours: made Christ’s death real.”
In the full entry for this one, Kidd provides more background, including the rather myopic reaction by many religious readers:
I had said in Interview magazine that the one jacket I always wanted to design was for the bible, and now here was my chance. I was told that this was not a text for churches but for readers, and to treat it like a novel. When I came upon Andres Serrano’s The Morgue (Hacked to Death II) in the pages of Colors magazine … I knew it was perfect: here was a face looking at and reflecting death and life simultaneously. It was horrifying and beautiful, compelling and repulsive. I also knew it would be considered far too shocking and never get approved in a million years. But I had to try, and to my amazement the editors not only got it, but with [commissioning art director Michael Ian Kaye’s] encouragement they championed it.
Then all hell broke loose.
Once the book was published with this image, no religious bookstore would carry it, and neither would any of the national chains. I can only presume this was due to the “guilt by association” with Serrano’s Piss Christ … which is completely insane. And a disaster for the publisher. With no place to sell the book, it naturally didn’t sell. There was publicity, but not of it good. The only one to benefit from the whole thing was me — the jacket won every design competition extant. But where I may have triumphed aesthetically, as a practical advocate for the book itself I completely failed….
If I had to pick one single jacket I’m the most proud of, it would be this one. I never saw it as “getting away with something.” It was about serving an extremely difficult subject (to say the least) in the most truthful manner I could — visually, and yes, spiritually.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzmfqveCZX1qaqkgvo1_400.jpg)
Just finished Chip Kidd’s Book One: Work: 1986-2006, an incredibly inspiring collection of the book covers he’s designed, along with commentary from select authors and Kidd himself. I loved it.
Among the most striking jackets of the bunch: Kidd’s design for Richmond Lattimore’s translation of The New Testament. John Updike, introducing Kidd’s collection, states that this New Testament edition “may have bombed with booksellers but in two seconds [it] achieved what Mel Gibson strived to do in two hours: made Christ’s death real.”
In the full entry for this one, Kidd provides more background, including the rather myopic reaction by many religious readers:
I had said in Interview magazine that the one jacket I always wanted to design was for the bible, and now here was my chance. I was told that this was not a text for churches but for readers, and to treat it like a novel. When I came upon Andres Serrano’s The Morgue (Hacked to Death II) in the pages of Colors magazine … I knew it was perfect: here was a face looking at and reflecting death and life simultaneously. It was horrifying and beautiful, compelling and repulsive. I also knew it would be considered far too shocking and never get approved in a million years. But I had to try, and to my amazement the editors not only got it, but with [commissioning art director Michael Ian Kaye’s] encouragement they championed it.
Then all hell broke loose.
Once the book was published with this image, no religious bookstore would carry it, and neither would any of the national chains. I can only presume this was due to the “guilt by association” with Serrano’s Piss Christ … which is completely insane. And a disaster for the publisher. With no place to sell the book, it naturally didn’t sell. There was publicity, but not of it good. The only one to benefit from the whole thing was me — the jacket won every design competition extant. But where I may have triumphed aesthetically, as a practical advocate for the book itself I completely failed….
If I had to pick one single jacket I’m the most proud of, it would be this one. I never saw it as “getting away with something.” It was about serving an extremely difficult subject (to say the least) in the most truthful manner I could — visually, and yes, spiritually.
Beautiful work, great writing.
Congrats to Christopher Sergio Design for his award-winning design of The German Genius, which I’m reading now. Tremendous work.
Cross-posting one photo from this piece at the TOKY blog: “TOKY’s New Table, Made By Mirato”
The Cosmonaut stylus for touchscreens, reviewed by Marco Arment. Very intrigued.
The firm I work for encourages Hooky Days every October. I spent mine at the Frank Lloyd House-designed Kraus House in Kirkwood. Great time.
One work from “Slow Breaking News,” a clever project by design student Emily Roose: “For my Masters in Graphic Design thesis project at New England School of Art and Design, I designed and stitched breaking news stories into cross stitch samplers. I juxtaposed content that is extremely fast and ephemeral (breaking news stories) with a very slow and archival medium (cross stitch). I wanted to see how this transference of medium affects the message of these stories and highlights the absurdity of the way stories are reported in the media and the way we consume them.” (via Coudal)
Creative Review looks at the new identity for Zaha Hadid Architects. (Designboom has a go as well.)
Google Searches for the Human Touch
A few days ago, I posted “Google & the Non-Human Touch,” about In the Plex, which I’d just finished. In it, I quoted a Googler who a few years back was charged with preventing the company’s products from having too much of an editorial look, one that would suggest the products were designed by actual humans. The rule: No animations, nothing too … designy. “Google products are machine-driven,” she told her staff, implying that the design should say as much. (Voicelessly.)
It’s interesting to consider that previous strategy in light of Google+, the giant’s new go at a social network. One look at the site and it’s clear this has been art directed with an attention not bestowed on, well, any of their other products. Wired’s exclusive look at the project’s creation and launch chronicles a bit of that shift in strategy. It turns out Google’s finding some redeeming qualities in humans after all. From Wired:
[Larry] Page, however, seems to recognize that this project [code name: Emerald Sea] in some ways requires a different approach from the Google norm. One variation that users will notice comes in interface design — conspicuously, in Circles. With colorful animations, drag-and-drop magic and whimsical interface touches, Circles looks more like a classic Apple program than the typically bland Google app. That’s no surprise since the key interface designer was legendary software artist Andy Herzfeld.
The former Macintosh wizard now works at Google — though he loves the company, he had previously felt constrained because its design standards didn’t allow for individual creativity. But with Emerald Sea, he had a go-ahead to flex his creative muscles. “It wasn’t a given that anyone would like what I was doing, but they did,” he says.
Traditionally, Larry Page has been a blood foe of “swooshy” designs and animations geared to delight users. He feels that it such frills slow things down. But Page has signed off on the pleasing-pixel innovations in Circles, including a delightful animation when you delete a circle: It drops to the bottom of the screen, bounces and sinks to oblivion. That animation adds a few hundred milliseconds to the task; in the speed-obsessed Google world that’s like dropping “War and Peace” on a reading list. “I’ve heard in the past that Larry Page he didn’t like animations but that didn’t stop me from putting in a lot of animations in, and Larry told me he loves it.” says Hertzfeld. “Maybe Apple’s resurgence had a little bit to do with it.” In any case, Google has recently tapped Hertzfeld as the design leader of the Emerald Sea team.
Google & the Non-Human Touch
From Steven Levy’s In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives, which I’ve been enjoying:
Google had gotten a lot of flak for its impersonal interface style—some thought its programs and search pages so plain as to be ugly. “It’s like they almost want it to be insipid,” says Andy Hertzfeld, a former Macintosh wizard now at Google. Many decisions were made by testing rather than aesthetics—sometimes a minor tweak in spacing or the shade of a color could result in millions of dollars lost or gained in AdWord clicks. Also, Larry Page, wary of anything that would degrade performance, would routinely bounce any interface element with clever frills such as animation. “Artsy” designers seldom lasted long in the company, and one defector left behind a blistering blog post on Google’s visual shortcomings. The fact was, Google didn’t want to be beautiful. Marissa Mayer, the fierce protector of Google’s look, once quelled an incipient revolt by designers by finally defining what rankled her about a stunning design submitted to her. “It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,” Marissa told them. “It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.” In other words, the message Google wanted to convey was that its products had no human bias. “It was like this lightbulb went off,” says Margaret Stewart, a key curator of the Google interface. “Marissa said Google products are machine-driven. It was the locked-up principle that had never been expressed, and that was of enormous assistance to us.”
Writes Ryan Carson at Think Vitamin:
Mike Kus recently did an unauthorized re-align of innocentdrinks.co.uk which he unveiled at FOWD London. The point of the excercise was to demonstrate the importance of communicating the personality of a company on it’s website – making it more human. Interestingly, after he showed the video, Innocent got in touch with him about possibly working together.
He recorded the entire design process and sped it up to 3 minutes and 59 seconds and I think you’ll like it.
Yes, I liked it. Here’s Kus’ own post about the project.
Wallplates, an unusually useful light switch system. Clever. (Via Trendspotting)
