Chip Kidd Skillshare Lesson: Introduction to Book Cover Design: Making Stories Visual

I enjoyed Chip Kidd’s Skillshare Lesson because it not only gave great advice, but it was another opportunity to see more book covers and their designs.

Chip talks about typography, content and form and how they should all work together. He says that you should take the content and the form, put them together and then you get the full picture. His example of this was an album cover that was extremely minimal but the music (content) was so full that the cover didn’t have to be overwhelming. Sometimes a designer might try to exemplify the loud and full music by reflecting that on the cover, but then that might be too much for the buyer to wrap their head around.

I found it interesting that there are so many different ways to depict the same text like the Lolita book. Chip’s cover I thought was really striking because he not only used the cover to draw you in, but it’s also interactive in the way that you can take the sash off and get a whole new emphasized meaning behind the book. He really thought about this design and this is a great example of going beyond doing something traditional.

The section of his lesson I got the most inspiration from was the process of creating a successful, conceptual book design part.  He says that where you get your ideas for the covers you work on is from the text. Chip really thinks about the content of the book and how he can put that on the cover in a non obvious but effective way and that’s why he is so successful in his designs. His example for this was the Brazzaville Beach cover he did where it would be tempting to put references of animals on the cover since it is largely abut chimpanzees, but that is not a good idea to go with because it is too obvious. This reminded me of what he said in his TED talk of how you can either show apple or say apple but not both. He says that sometimes your first idea exists to be thrown away, and sometimes it works that your first idea was your best idea. This is good advice for when you are first starting. Later in his lesson he talks about not falling in love with an idea and this is important to keep in mind.

I also thought the series design part of this lesson was essential to know for our current project in class since we are creating two book covers that should go well together.  Two ways he kept continuity between a series were using articles of clothing on the cover which would have been worn by the characters to tie them all together and he also for another series used typography to hold them all together along with photography.

My concluding thought on Chip Kidd’s Skillshare Lesson is that it’s comforting to know that the great book designer Chip Kidd still gets flat out rejected sometimes and that’s how he learns and makes his designs better. He is really an inspiration for taking the content of the book and creating a great concept for the cover, which is something this whole advanced graphic design class is going to focus on.