To be different, we must embrace the unusual – The Boston Globe

February 28, 2006 by  

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.

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