Chip Kidd's The Learners: I Know, It's Just A Damn Cover, But What A Cover

I keep looking at the cover of Chip Kidd's The Learners: appreciating the thwock! of the Chris Ware line art; the nostalgic frisson of the image printed right on the cover; the cleverness of the angled, partial book jacket which obscures the character’s expression (and which thus gives the cover a punchline); the way the angled jacket invokes x-acto blades and, I just realized, Batman hideouts; the way the type on the jacket suggests the image it hides. This is the joy of seeing an object which has been completely thought through by a gifted practitioner. There are no inefficiencies here, no sputter of compromise, no smear of laziness. Maybe I just know too much about the design process to know how exceptional this is. 

Comments

[Mandy]

Yeah. I'm no designer, so my immediate thought was, "Oh, it's like Harriet the Spy + horror!"