Chip Kidd: Who is he? Why is he important to us?
Chip Kidd was reared in Lincoln Park and graduated from Wilson High School and Penn State University. At 44, he is an art director at Knopf Publishing, a division of Random House. Turning out jacket designs at an average of 75 a year, he has free-lanced for Doubleday, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Grove Press, HarperCollins, Penguin/Putnam, Scribner and Columbia University Press in addition to his work for Knopf. His output includes cover concepts for books by Mark Beyer, Augusten Burroughs, Bret Easton Ellis, Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Frank Miller, Haruki Murakami, Michael Ondaatje, Alex Ross, Charles Schulz, Osamu Tezuka, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, John Updike and others. His design for Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" novel was carried over into marketing for the film adaptation. Oliver Sacks and other authors have contract clauses stating that Kidd design their books. In early 2008, Kidd started an alternative rock band, writing and recording music under the name Artbreak. He takes the role of songwriting, vocals and percussion. He has written two novels.
Chip Kidd is a Graphic Designer, author and editor–a man of many talents. In an interview Kidd expressed his passion for all of these things because he is most passionate about authorship, making everything. He is very important to know about right now because he has designed over 1000 unique book covers. Somehow he found a way to make each unique. An important point he mad was to try to avoid something that is literal. He relies on the author to provide enough depth and unique qualities that no book will be similar because the stories are special. In designing books that are big best-sellers the most challenging part is appealing to the masses but try to surprise people. He makes the point that subject matter is important but the challenge is to subvert the genre. Book covers should suggest sensibility, be coy and more discrete than other medias such as magazines, or album covers. An interesting piece of advise he said was for anyone who wants to design book jackets to move to New York City.
John Gall: Who is he? Why is he important to us?
John Gall is the art director for Vintage/Anchor Books. His award-winning cover designs for Alfred A Knopf, Grove Press and CD packages for Nonesuch records have been recognized by the AIGA, Art Directors Club, Print, Graphis, and ID magazine and are featured in the books: Next: The New Generation of Graphic Design; Less Is More; and the forthcoming By Its Cover: Modern American Book Cover Design. He has also written about graphic design covering an array of topics from the history of Grove Press to contemporary skateboard graphics. His first book Sayonara Home Run! The Art of the Japanese Baseball Card will be published in Spring 2006.
In an interview he said that a good book cover conveys the essence of the book in a unique and surprising way that maybe pushed the design envelope a bit. Allow the book to make a great first impression. There is more freedom in hardcover design, less people buy them on impulse because their price so they are more review driven. Covers could be as conceptual as any other type of design, though in a more general way. he says his way of working is "If you think this is the way it should be done–do the opposite". He is a big fan of the happy accident, as am I. It is encouraging to know other designers think that way too. Sometimes I just fall into something that looks really cool on accident. We should consider how the cover will be seen on websites, phones, web readers etc. Designers are not just typesetters like those messing on their home computers, we need to raise the bar and make it all work and be unique. A little bit of depressing information he said: "I think about this (another job) all the time. Like having a nice job that starts at 9 and ends at 5. Or during certain frustrating times, I wish I had a job that had all the ambiguity removed, like a short-order cook or something. Two eggs over easy. There. Done. Next
This Means That
One broad goal for English for Academic Purposes students is to learn to write effectively so they can succeed in their chosen academic studies. The teaching of academic writing sensitive to context and texts has benefited from disciplinary based writing studies, allowing EAP teachers and their students to become better informed about the valued writing practices of various disciplines. A further development in this area can be gained by investigating from a linguistic perspective the role of writing for learning in those disciplines.
This paper reports on a longitudinal study which mapped from a lexicogrammatical perspective how L1 education students' writing developed as their disciplinary knowledge increased. Systemic functional linguistics provided the theoretical framework for the study and the analytical tools. Reasoning and explaining, reporting and engaging with knowledge claims, and engaging with the discipline as a future practitioner were intrinsic to the learner discourse of education in this study. The contextualised descriptions of the lexicogrammatical choices the students made in their writing provide authentic disciplinary examples for EAP writing teachers. These resources will allow EAP teachers and their students to examine writing not only from the perspective of learning to write, but from the perspective of writing to learn in the discipline.
