The first day of class was interesting. We spoke about graphic design career. Professor asked us to ask her questions about her job experience.
The video Chip Kidd: The art of first Impression in design and life, is a TED based talk in which book designer of book Chip Kidd showers light on the importance of clarity and mystery. Talk starts with interesting unfamiliar words based on noise that was delivered with extreme dedication and grabbed the audience attention in a moment. He drew attention on the importance of clarity through his unclear speech start. Main focus on this discussion is that often we humans underestimate the power of mystery and unclear things. Everything unimportant has its importance if it is used in the right way. Clarity is always striking, and everyone understands it, it is always based on honesty and bluntness, while the mystery is like an attractive puzzle that is complicated, unknown and demands to get decoded. In this talk, he illustrated that how the merger of clarity with mystery and decoded mystery, can create a far stronger impact on the audience than blunt clarity. And how he used this approach in his famous book covers.
My favorite example was the book cover of “Colorless Tsukuru Tzaki”. I am intrigued by the use of theme and philosophy of the book and its mysterious but clear representation in the book cover. It was amazing that he took the inspiration for cover from the subway station. I loved the way he looks at ordinary objects and takes unique inspiration from them that we often neglect. The second best example was the book cover of “Fraud”. This was simple and based on a simple concept of rewriting and editing the name of an author.
Do you use a similar approach of clarity and mystery in every aspect of your life?
