To be different, we must embrace the unusual – The Boston Globe
February 28, 2006 by Mary Wynne-Wynter
This is the best story to start my day. I had never before heard of Chip Kidd, the iconoclast book designer, but I relate.
I'll also take a moment say to all the superiors, bureaucrats, bad teachers, obstructionists and control freaks, who told me my ideas were too 'far out', or that I was not a 'good fit'...THANK YOU!
To be different, we must embrace the unusual - The Boston Globe: By Dale Dauten | February 26, 2006
Most people in business don't aspire to a style, but a system. Every new problem is sorted into old solutions. (''What our new client wants sounds like the proposal we did for McDonald's. Just change the name, do a little tweaking and we're done.") It's systematic anticreativity, efficient mediocrity. Most companies aspire to being different, but few understand that to get there they must embrace the unusual, whether it be a person or idea.
To return to Kidd's greatest lesson and sum it up in a single word, successful performers must be antipreconceptionist. And I hope someday to see that word on ''Jeopardy," perhaps in response to ''The secret of being a superstar is being one of these."
''Early on my freshman advisor told me about a relatively obscure area of concentration within the [art] department called Graphic Design. How obscure? Well, they graduated 18 seniors a year. On a campus of 30,000-plus kids."
Without realizing it, Kidd had made his first decision toward being extraordinary, simply by rejecting the ordinary. And once in the program, he learned what he called his greatest lesson: ''Any preconceived notion of an approach to take before you properly define the problem is folly."
The result? ''I've been described as not having any recognizable style and that's one of the greatest compliments I could hope for. I want each book to have as much of its own individual personality as possible, based on what it is and what it's about." Chip Kidd got where he is by accident, not design.