design and life

The art of first impressions -- in design and life

第一印象的艺术——有关设计与生活
封面设计师奇普·基德实在太了解人们如何根据第一印象评断事情了。在这场充满乐趣、行云流水的演说中，他介绍了两种设计师用来做瞬间沟通的技巧 — 清晰度和神祕感 — 以及他们何时出现，为什么出现、该怎么使用。他表扬了了一些漂亮的、实用的设计，奚落了一些不是那么好的设计，并分享了他自己一些经典书本封面设计背后的灵感。
Chip Kidd · Graphic designer
Chip Kidd's book jacket designs spawned a revolution in the art of American book packaging.

Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, blah.

So what the hell was that? Well, you don't know because you couldn't understand it. It wasn't clear. But hopefully, it was said with enough conviction that it was at least alluringly mysterious.
这都说得是什么鬼？你不知道因为你根本听不懂这话说的不明不白还好，有一点可以确信至少这段话神秘而有趣

Clarity or mystery? I'm balancing these two things in my daily work as a graphic designer, as well as my daily life as a New Yorker every day, and there are two elements that absolutely fascinate me.

想要明确性还是神秘感作为一名平面设计师我在工作中平衡二者作为纽约人我在生活中也是如此每天如此我着迷于两种元素
Here's an example. Now, how many people know what this is? Okay. Now how many people know what this is? Okay. Thanks to two more deft strokes by the genius Charles M. Schulz, we now have seven deft strokes that in and of themselves create an entire emotional life, one that has enthralled hundreds of millions of fans for over 50 years. This is actually a cover of a book that I designed about the work of Schulz and his art, which will be coming out this fall, and that is the entire cover. There is no other typographic information or visual information on the front, and the name of the book is "Only What's Necessary." So this is sort of symbolic about the decisions I have to make every day about the design that I'm perceiving, and the design I'm creating.
举个例子多少人知道这是什么？好吧，那么现在呢？多亏查尔斯·M·舒尔茨 那绝妙的两笔 现在，我们有了这简单的七笔线条 来展现整个感情生活 一张在过去的50年里 积攒了亿万粉丝的脸 其实，这是我设计的一本书的封面 介绍舒尔茨和他的作品 今年秋季发售 这就是整个封面 封面上没有别的文字信息或视觉信息 书名叫《绝无赘述》 所以，这象征了我每天必须 做出的设计抉择 有关我接收到的设计 以及我创作出的设计
So clarity. Clarity gets to the point. It's blunt. It's honest. It's sincere. We ask ourselves this. ["When should you be clear?"也就是明确性 重点就是明确性 直截了当，诚实而有诚意 我们问自己 [何时应当保持清晰？
Now, something like this, whether we can read it or not, needs to be really, really clear. Is it?
现在，比如这个无论我们是否看得懂都必须要非常、非常地明确对吧？
This is a rather recent example of urban clarity that I just love, mainly because I'm always late and I am always in a hurry. So when these meters started showing up a couple of years ago on street corners, I was thrilled, because now I finally knew how many seconds I had to get across the street before I got run over by a car. Six? I can do that.
这是近期一个关于城市明确性的例子我非常喜欢主要是因为，我经常迟到，通常很赶所以，当这些计时器在最近几年开始在街角出现的时候我很激动，因为我终于知道了我必须在多少秒内通过街道才能不被车撞到六秒？我做得到
So let's look at the yin to the clarity yang, and that is mystery. Mystery is a lot more complicated by its very definition. Mystery demands to be decoded, and when it's done right, we really, really want to. ["When should you be mysterious?"] In World War II, the Germans really, really wanted to decode this, and they couldn't.
现在，我们来看看与阳对应的阴（此处他指的是阴阳对立面关系）也就是神秘神秘感就其定义来说极度复杂神秘感需要解码要是做得好的话我们会非常非常想去解码[何时应当保持神秘？] 在第二次世界大战时， 德国特别想破译这个 但他们失败了
Here's an example of a design that I've done recently for a novel by Haruki Murakami, who I've done design work for for over 20 years now, and this is a novel about a young man who has four dear friends who all of a sudden, after their freshman year of college, completely cut him off with no explanation, and he is devastated. And the friends' names each have a connotation in Japanese to a color. So there's Mr. Red, there's Mr. Blue, there's Ms. White, and Ms. Black. Tsukuru Tazaki, his name does not correspond to a color, so his nickname is Colorless, and as he's looking back on their friendship, he recalls that they were like five fingers on a hand. So I created this sort of abstract representation of this, but there's a lot more going on underneath the surface of the story, and there's more going on underneath the surface of the jacket. The four fingers are now four train lines in the Tokyo subway system, which has significance within the story. And then you have the colorless subway line intersecting with each of the other colors, which basically he does later on in the story. He catches up with each of these people to find out why they treated him the way they did.
这是我最近所做设计的例子设计村上春树的小说我已经为他做了20多年的设计工作， 这本小说，讲述一个小伙子， 有四个挚友 他们突然在大一之后
And so this is the three-dimensional finished product sitting on my desk in my office, and what I was hoping for here is that you'll simply be allured by the mystery of what this looks like, and will want to read it to decode and find out and make more clear why it looks the way it does.
完全孤立了他，也并没有向他解释小伙子变得消沉其中每个挚友的名字隐含了日文中的一种颜色有红色先生、蓝色先生、白色先生和黑色先生而多崎造的名字并不对应某种颜色所以，他也叫“无色” 当他回顾他们的友谊时 他记得他们就像一只手的五个手指 因此，我创作了这样一个抽象概念 但是表面情节之下还潜藏着很多事情 同样，封面之下也潜藏了很多事情 四根手指现在是东京地铁系统的 四条线路 在故事里非常重要 然后，你有这条无色地铁线路 与其他色彩相交 正如小伙子在之后的故事里的所作所为 他找到每一个人 去寻求他们这样对待他的原因
["The Visual Vernacular."]
这就是三维成品它在我办公室的桌上我希望在座的各位能够被它的神秘感所吸引并且想要阅读这本书去破译它，从而更清楚地了解它为什么长这个样子

This is a way to use a more familiar kind of mystery. What does this mean? This is what it means. ["Make it look like something else."] The visual vernacular is the way we are used to seeing a certain thing applied to something else so that we see it in a different way.[“视觉白话”]
This is an approach I wanted to take to a book of essays by David Sedaris that had this title at the time. ["All the Beauty You Will Ever Need"] Now, the challenge here was that this title actually means nothing. It's not connected to any of the essays in the book. It came to the author's boyfriend in a dream. Thank you very much, so -- (Laughter) -- so usually, I am creating a design that is in some way based on the text, but this is all the text there is. So you've got this mysterious title that really doesn't mean anything, so I was trying to think: Where might I see a bit of mysterious text that seems to mean something but doesn't? And sure enough, not long after, one evening after a Chinese meal, this arrived, and I thought, "Ah, bing, ideagasm!" (Laughter) I've always loved the hilariously mysterious tropes of fortune cookies that seem to mean something extremely deep but when you think about them -- if you think about them -- they really don't. This says, "Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future." Thank you. (Laughter) But we can take this visual vernacular and apply it to Mr. Sedaris, and we are so familiar with how fortune cookie fortunes look that we don't even need the bits of the cookie anymore. We're just seeing this strange thing and we know we love David Sedaris, and so we're hoping that we're in for a good time.
这是一种运用更熟悉的神秘感的方法什么意思？
["'Fraud' Essays by David Rakoff"] David Rakoff was a wonderful writer and he called his first book "Fraud" because he was getting sent on assignments by magazines to do things that he was not equipped to do. So he was this skinny little urban guy and GQ magazine would send him down the Colorado River whitewater rafting to see if he would survive. And then he would write about it, and he felt that he was a fraud and that he was misrepresenting himself. And so I wanted the cover of this book to also misrepresent itself and then somehow show a reader reacting to it.
就是这个意思["让它看起来像其他东西"] 视觉白话 就是我们习惯把一种事物 视为另一种事物 从而我们以不同的方法看待它
This led me to graffiti. I'm fascinated by graffiti. I think anybody who lives in an urban environment encounters graffiti all the time, and there's all different sorts of it. This is a picture I took on the Lower East Side of just a transformer box on the sidewalk and it's been tagged like crazy. Now whether you look at this and think, "Oh, that's a charming urban affectation," or you look at it and say, "That's illegal abuse of property," the one thing I think we can all agree on is that you cannot read it. Right? There is no clear message here. There is another kind of graffiti that I find far more interesting, which I call editorial graffiti. This is a picture I took recently in the subway, and sometimes you see lots of prurient, stupid stuff, but I thought this was interesting, and this is a poster that is saying rah-rah Airbnb, and someone has taken a Magic Marker and has editorialized about what they think about it. And it got my attention.

对于戴维·赛达瑞斯的散文集 我想采取的就是这个方法 那时这是它的书名 ［《你所需的一切美丽》] 现在，难点在于这个标题并没有任何含义 它和书中的任何一篇文章都没有联系 它来自于作者男友的一个梦 非常感谢，那么（笑声） 那么我就要创作一个 在某种程度上基于文章的设计 但文章就只有这些 所以你就看到了这神秘的 没有任何含义的题目 我就试图想： 我会在哪里看到这样神秘的文字 看似有着某种含义 却其实并没有呢？ 果然，不久之后 一天晚上我吃完中国菜后 这个出现了，我想 “啊，对了，有了！”（笑声） 我很喜欢幸运饼干里 那些搞笑而神秘的隐晦短语 貌似蕴含着什么深刻道理 但是，如果你真的会思考它们的话—— 它们真的没什么意义 上面写着，“几乎没人知道， 忽略未来可以给你带来多少好处” 谢谢（笑声） 但如果我们能将这个视觉白话 运用在赛达瑞斯先生上 我们不需要幸运饼干 就知道幸运饼干里的运气是什么样的 我们看到了这个奇怪的标题 我们也知道我们很喜欢戴维·赛达瑞斯 我们自然期待着我们会很享受阅读

So I was thinking, how do we apply this to this book? So I get the book by this person, and I start reading it, and I'm thinking, this guy is not who he says he is; he's a fraud. And I get out a red Magic Marker, and out of frustration just scribble this across the front. Design done. (Laughter) And they went for it! (Laughter) Author liked it, publisher liked it, and that is how the book went out into the world, and it was really fun to see people reading this on the subway and walking around with it and what have you, and they all sort of looked like they were crazy. (Laughter)

[大卫·拉科夫《欺诈》] 大卫·拉科夫是一位极好的作家 他把他的第一本书称为《欺诈》 因为他被杂志分配到了 一些他根本没有能力完成的任务里 就这样，他是这么瘦小的一个城里人 《智族》杂志却把他发配到 科罗拉多河上漂流 然后看他能不能幸存 然后，他还要描写这段经历， 他觉得他就是个骗子 他觉得他在歪曲自己 因此，我想这本书的封面也歪曲这本书本身 然后，用某种方式让读者对此产生反应

["'Perfidia' a novel by James Ellroy"] Okay, James Ellroy, amazing crime writer, a good friend, I've worked with him for many years. He is probably best known as the author of "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential." His most recent novel was called this, which is a very mysterious name that I'm sure a lot of people know what it means, but a lot of people don't. And it's a story about a Japanese-American detective in Los Angeles in 1941 investigating a murder. And then Pearl Harbor happens, and as if his life wasn't difficult enough, now the race relations have really ratcheted up, and then the Japanese-American internment camps are quickly created, and there's lots of tension and horrible stuff as he's still trying to solve this murder. And so I did at first think very literally about this in terms of all right, we'll take Pearl Harbor and we'll add it to Los Angeles and we'll make this apocalyptic dawn on the horizon of the city. And so that's a picture from Pearl Harbor just grafted onto Los Angeles. My editor in chief said, "You know, it's interesting but I think you can do better and I think you can make it simpler." And so I went back to the drawing board, as I often do. But also, being alive to my surroundings, I work in a high-rise in Midtown, and every night, before I leave the office, I have to push this button to get out, and the big heavy glass doors open and I can get onto the elevator. And one night, all of a sudden, I looked at this and I saw it in a way that I hadn't really noticed it before. Big red circle, danger. And I thought this was so obvious that it had to have been done a zillion times, and so I did a Google image search, and I couldn't find another book cover that looked quite like this, and so this is really what solved the problem, and graphically it's more interesting and creates a bigger tension between the idea of a certain kind of sunrise coming up over L.A. and America.
这让我想到了涂鸦我痴迷于涂鸦我想任何一个在城市里生活的人都会经常看到涂鸦各种各样的涂鸦这是我在下东区拍下的照片就是一个人行道边上的变压器箱它已经被疯狂地画满了涂鸦现在，无论你看到它后是想到”哦，这真是个可爱的城市装点“ 还是看到它后会说， “这是非法占用财产” 在有一点上我想我们都会同意 你读不出来这些涂鸦 对吧？这里没有明确的信息 还有另外一种涂鸦，我觉得更为有趣 我称它为评论涂鸦 这是最近我在地铁中拍下的照片 有些时候，你看到很多淫乱、愚蠢的东西 但是，我认为这很有趣 这是一张海报， 上面写着 “呜啦，呜啦，Airbnb“ 有人用马克笔 评论了他们对此的看法 这引起了我的注意 所以，我想， 我们怎么把它运用到这本书上呢？
["'Gulp' A tour of the human digestive system by Mary Roach."]

我从作者那里拿到这本书，然后开始阅读我想这个人并不像他说的，是个骗子之后，我拿起我的红色马克笔然后像在封面上出气一样地乱画设计完啦（笑声）然后他们批准了！（笑声）作者喜欢，出版商喜欢这就是这本书如何来到这个世界上的我看到人们在地铁上读这本书拿着它走路，这真的很可笑他们看起来都有点像疯子

Mary Roach is an amazing writer who takes potentially mundane scientific subjects and makes them not mundane at all; she makes them really fun. So in this particular case, it's about the human digestive system. So I'm trying to figure out what is the cover of this book going to be. This is a self-portrait. (Laughter) Every morning I look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror to see if my tongue is black. And if it's not, I'm good to go. (Laughter) I recommend you all do this. But I also started thinking, here's our introduction. Right? Into the human digestive system. But I think what we can all agree on is that actual photographs of human mouths, at least based on this, are off-putting. (Laughter) So for the cover, then, I had this illustration done which is literally more palatable and reminds us that it's best to approach the digestive system from this end. (Laughter) I don't even have to complete the sentence. All right.

[詹姆斯•埃尔罗伊《背叛》] 好，埃尔罗伊，令人惊艳的犯罪小说作家 一个好朋友，我和他已经一起工作好多年 他最广为人知的就是 他的《黑色大丽花》和《洛杉矶的秘密》 这是他最新小说的名字，名字很神秘 我确定很多人知道它的意思 但也有很多人不知道 小说讲述了一个日裔美籍侦探 1941年在洛杉矶 调查一桩谋杀案的故事 之后，珍珠港事件发生了 然后就好像生活没有难为够他一样 现在，种族关系也变得紧张 日裔美国人拘留营很快就被建立起来 有很多紧张可怕的事情 但是他始终试图查清这个谋杀案 所以我一开始真的只考虑了字面意义 那好，我们就把珍珠港加在洛杉矶上 再在城市地平线上添上预示灾难的黎明 所以这就是一张把珍珠港 直接拼接在洛杉矶上的照片 我的主编说， “你知道，这有点意思， 但是我想你能做得更好 你能把它变得更简单。” 就像我经常做的那样， 我回到绘图板 但是，在我的环境中工作 我在中城的摩天楼里工作
["Unuseful mystery"] What happens when clarity and mystery get mixed up? And we see this all the time. This is what I call unuseful mystery. I go down into the subway -- I take the subway a lot -- and this piece of paper is taped to a girder. Right? And now I'm thinking, uh-oh, and the train's about to come and I'm trying to figure out what this means, and thanks a lot. Part of the problem here is that they've compartmentalized the information in a way they think is helpful, and frankly, I don't think it is at all. So this is mystery we do not need. What we need is useful clarity, so just for fun, I redesigned this. This is using all the same elements. (Applause) Thank you. I am still waiting for a call from the MTA. (Laughter) You know, I'm actually not even using more colors than they use. They just didn't even bother to make the 4 and the 5 green, those idiots. (Laughter) So the first thing we see is that there is a service change, and then, in two complete sentences with a beginning, a middle and an end, it tells us what the change is and what's going to be happening. Call me crazy!
每晚，在我离开办公室之前我必须按下这个按钮才能出去又大又重的玻璃门才能打开我才能登上电梯一天晚上，突然我以一种前所未有的方式观察了它大红圈，危险但我想，它这么明显肯定被用过无数次了我就用谷歌搜索了一下图片却并有找到另外与之类似的书的封面它真的解决了问题从图像上看更生动有趣并使这个想法产生了更大的张力某种黎明马上就要笼罩在洛杉矶和美国的上空[玛丽·罗奇《吞咽：人体消化系统游览》]

["Useful mystery"] All right. Now, here is a piece of mystery that I love: packaging. This redesign of the Diet Coke can by Turner Duckworth is to me truly a piece of art. It's a work of art. It's beautiful. But part of what makes it so heartening to me as a designer is that he's taken the visual vernacular of Diet Coke -- the typefaces, the colors, the silver background -- and he's reduced them to their most essential parts, so it's like going back to the Charlie Brown face. It's like, how can you give them just enough information so they know what it is but giving them the credit for the knowledge that they already have about this thing? It looks great, and you would go into a delicatessen and all of a sudden see that on the shelf, and it's wonderful. Which makes the next thing -- ["Unuseful clarity"] -- all the more disheartening, at least to me. So okay, again, going back down into the subway, after this came out, these are pictures that I took. Times Square subway station: Coca-Cola has bought out the entire thing for advertising. Okay? And maybe some of you know where this is going. Ahem.
玛丽·罗奇是一位极好的作者 她把看似乏味的科学话题 变得一点也不乏味 她令它们变得非常有趣 所以这个例子 是关于人类消化系统的 我在想这本书的封面是什么样的 这是我的自画像（笑声） 每天早上我都会照一照药箱上的镜子 检查一下我的舌头是不是黑色的 如果不是的话，我就可以出门了 （笑声） 我建议你们都这么做 但同时我也开始想 这是我们的“入门” 对吧？人体消化系统入门 但我想我们至少都会同意 人体口腔的照片 或者是基于它的作品 都是使人反感的（笑声） 所以我给封面画了这个插画 更容易被接受一点 并提示我们 了解消化系统的最好途径 是从这端—— （笑声） 我甚至不用说完

"You moved to New York with the clothes on your back, the cash in your pocket, and your eyes on the prize. You're on Coke." (Laughter) "You moved to New York with an MBA, one clean suit, and an extremely firm handshake. You're on Coke." (Laughter) These are real! (Laughter) Not even the support beams were spared, except they switched into Yoda mode. (Laughter) "Coke you're on." (Laughter) ["Excuse me, I'm on WHAT??"] This campaign was a huge misstep. It was pulled almost instantly due to consumer backlash and all sorts of unflattering parodies on the web -- (Laughter) -- and also that dot next to "You're on," that's not a period, that's a trademark. So thanks a lot.

［无用的神秘感］当明确性和神秘感混淆在一起时会发生什么？我们随时都能见到这样的例子这就是我所谓的无用的神秘感我走进地铁站—— 我经常乘坐地铁—— 看到贴在柱子上的这张纸 对吧？我就开始想了， 哎呀——呃 列车就要来了 而我还在纠结于它想表达的含义 我也真是谢谢它了 这里，一部分问题是 他们已经划分了信息 根据他们认为信息有用与否 但坦白而言，我并不认为有用 所以这就是我们不需要的神秘感 我们需要用得上的明确性 所以只是为了好玩， 我重新设计了它 用的全是一样的元素（掌声） 谢谢，我还在等着地铁公司的电话 你知道吗，我甚至连一个颜色 也没比他们多用 他们甚至都懒得把4和5变成绿色 这帮蠢货（笑声） 所以我们看到的第一条信息是 有一个服务变更 然后是两个完整的句子 有开始，有过程，有结尾 它告诉我们什么服务变更了 还有现在会发生什么 就说我是疯子吧（笑声）

So to me, this was just so bizarre about how they could get the packaging so mysteriously beautiful and perfect and the message so unbearably, clearly wrong. It was just incredible to me.


［有用的神秘］好的这是一个我喜欢的秘密：包装这个健怡可乐罐的新设计来自特纳•达克沃斯 于我而言这是一件真正的艺术品 它是一件艺术品 它这样美 而作为设计师，我认为它 振奋人心的一部分原因是 特纳利用了健怡可乐的视觉地域性—— 字体，颜色，银色的背景—— 并将其精简到了最核心的部分 所以，就像回到查理·布朗的面孔 就像你恰好给出充分的信息 但同时尊重他们已有的 关于它的知识 它看上去很好 你可以走进便利店 然后在货架上看到它们 这很完美 也就让接下来的这件事 ［无用的明确性］ 更令人沮丧 至少对我而言是这样 那么，好的 让我们再走进地铁站 接下来就会出现 我拍的一些照片 时代广场地铁站 可口可乐买了整个这样一片 用来做广告，好的 或许你们中的某些人知道我要说什么
So I just hope that I've been able to share with you some of my insights on the uses of clarity and mystery in my work, and maybe how you might decide to be more clear in your life, or maybe to be a bit more mysterious and not so over-sharing. (Laughter)
“你搬到纽约，背着衣服” “揣着现金，盯着大奖” “你绝对用了可口可乐／可卡因了。” “你搬到纽约，带着MBA文凭， 一身整洁的西装，” “一个出奇结实的握手，” “你绝对用了可口可乐／可卡因了。” 这些都是真的！（笑声） 连承重柱也能逃此一劫 除了他们切换成尤达大师语气 “你这是用了可口可乐／可卡因啊！” ［“抱歉，我用什么了？”］ 这个策划真是错误的一步棋 由于买家的强力反对 它几乎瞬间就被撤除了 然后网上就出现了各种 令人不悦的滑稽效仿———— 然后“你上”旁边的那个点 不是个句号，而是注册商标 所以也真是多谢了

And if there's just one thing that I leave you with from this talk, I hope it's this: Blih blih blih blah. Blah blah blih blih. ["'Judge This,' Chip Kidd"] Blih blih blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.
对我而言，这太怪异了他们居然可以有那么神秘、完美而漂亮的包装却有这么令人无可忍受的错误信息这在我看来简直是难以置信
Blah blah.
所以，我希望和你们分享一些我的想法关于我作品中对明确性和神秘感的用法然后或许你们就会决定在生活中过得更加明确或是更加神秘而不是如此这般过度分享