Chip Kidd Quotes & Sayings

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. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

Hey, have you heard that one about the difference between me, Wit, and my loutish cousin, Hilarity? No? Okay, so I walk into a bar, you see, very unassuming, and order a martini. Then the bartender, Hilarity, hauls off and squirts me in the face with a seltzer bottle, ruining my n ice new camel hair suit, dousing my monocle and my watch fob, soaking my cravat. So, do I let him have what for, and blow my top? I do not. I simply say:
Sorry, I believe I said 'very dry'. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

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

Just who are the cheese monkeys? And what do they want? — Chip Kidd

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

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. — Chip Kidd

( ... ) I'm not much of anything, ( ... ) besides bored and boring, punctuated by fits of scant self-amusement. And you are ... ? — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

Nothing worth knowing can ever be taught in a classroom. — Chip Kidd

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

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. — Chip Kidd

I've been drawing shoes,' said Sketch, evoking a fireman who's been searching the smoking hulks of scorched buildings for burn victims, 'and it's been going feetingly. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

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

Even if I wasn't a Japanophile, I would still use chopsticks all the time, for all kinds of cuisine. Especially salads, which can be unwieldy on a fork. The cultural difference between selecting your food and stabbing it is symbolic of the quiet simplicity of the East versus the blunt directness of the West. — Chip Kidd

If you can properly define the problem, then you've already defined the solution as well. — Chip Kidd

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? — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness - a little bit of humanity. — Chip Kidd

I'm a very slow reader. — Chip Kidd

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

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. — Chip Kidd

If you intend to die, you can do anything. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

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? — Chip Kidd

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

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'. — Chip Kidd

( ... ) 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. — Chip Kidd

I am all for the iPad, but trust me - smelling it will get you nowhere. — Chip Kidd

Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores: if the one you're with isn't doing the job, there's always, always, always another. — Chip Kidd

It's not Art. And Art is not Design. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

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. — Chip Kidd

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

I often get asked, 'Is the book dead?' It hasn't happened yet. It's different than music. Music was always meant to be pure sound - it started out as pure sound and now it's pure sound again. But books started out as things. Words on paper began as words on paper. The paperback book is the best technology to deliver that information to you. — Chip Kidd

Life is a life-long assignment that must be constantly analyzed, clarified, figured out, and responded to appropriately. — Chip Kidd

What people really want, no matter who they are, is someone to listen to them ... people have a lot on their minds, however trivial, and if you're simply willing to sit there like a sack of dirt and let them yammer, they will tell it to you. — Chip Kidd