WEBVTT 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:08.000 Hi. 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:10.000 (Laughter) 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:13.000 I did that for two reasons. 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:16.000 First of all, I wanted to give you 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:19.000 a good visual first impression. 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:22.000 But the main reason I did it is that 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:25.000 that's what happens to me when I'm forced to wear 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:28.000 a Lady Gaga skanky mic. 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:31.000 (Laughter) 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:35.000 I'm used to a stationary mic. 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:38.000 It's the sensible shoe of public address. 00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:44.000 (Laughter) 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:47.000 But you clamp this thing on my head, and something happens. 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:50.000 I just become skanky. 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:54.000 (Laughter) So I'm sorry about that. 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:57.000 And I'm already off-message. 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:00.000 (Laughter) 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:03.000 Ladies and gentlemen, 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:07.000 I have devoted the past 25 years of my life 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:09.000 to designing books. 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:11.000 "Yes, BOOKS. You know, the bound volumes with ink on paper. 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:13.000 You cannot turn them off with a switch. 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:15.000 Tell your kids." 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:19.000 It all sort of started as a benign mistake, 00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:22.000 like penicillin. (Laughter) 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:25.000 What I really wanted 00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:27.000 was to be a graphic designer 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:29.000 at one of the big design firms in New York City. 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:32.000 But upon arrival there, 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:36.000 in the fall of 1986, and doing a lot of interviews, 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:39.000 I found that the only thing I was offered 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:42.000 was to be Assistant to the Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf, 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:44.000 a book publisher. 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:47.000 Now I was stupid, 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:50.000 but not so stupid that I turned it down. 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:53.000 I had absolutely no idea 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:55.000 what I was about to become part of, 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:57.000 and I was incredibly lucky. 00:01:57.000 --> 00:02:01.000 Soon, it had occurred to me what my job was. 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:04.000 My job was to ask this question: 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:05.000 "What do the stories look like?" 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:08.000 Because that is what Knopf is. 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:11.000 It is the story factory, one of the very best in the world. 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:14.000 We bring stories to the public. 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:17.000 The stories can be anything, 00:02:17.000 --> 00:02:19.000 and some of them are actually true. 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:24.000 But they all have one thing in common: 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:27.000 They all need to look like something. 00:02:27.000 --> 00:02:30.000 They all need a face. 00:02:30.000 --> 00:02:34.000 Why? To give you a first impression 00:02:34.000 --> 00:02:37.000 of what you are about to get into. 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:41.000 A book designer gives form to content, 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:43.000 but also 00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:46.000 manages a very careful balance between the two. 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:48.000 Now, the first day 00:02:48.000 --> 00:02:51.000 of my graphic design training at Penn State University, 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:54.000 the teacher, Lanny Sommese, came into the room 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:57.000 and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard, 00:02:57.000 --> 00:02:59.000 and wrote the word "Apple" underneath, 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:02.000 and he said, "OK. Lesson one. Listen up." 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:05.000 And he covered up the picture and he said, 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:08.000 "You either say this," and then he covered up the word, 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:11.000 "or you show this. 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:14.000 But you don't do this." 00:03:14.000 --> 00:03:19.000 Because this is treating your audience like a moron. 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:22.000 (Laughter) 00:03:22.000 --> 00:03:25.000 And they deserve better. 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:27.000 And lo and behold, soon enough, 00:03:27.000 --> 00:03:30.000 I was able to put this theory to the test 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:34.000 on two books that I was working on for Knopf. 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:38.000 The first was Katharine Hepburn's memoirs, 00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:41.000 and the second was a biography of Marlene Dietrich. 00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:44.000 Now the Hepburn book 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:47.000 was written in a very conversational style, 00:03:47.000 --> 00:03:50.000 it was like she was sitting across a table telling it all to you. 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:53.000 The Dietrich book was an observation 00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:55.000 by her daughter; it was a biography. 00:03:55.000 --> 00:03:58.000 So the Hepburn story is words 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:02.000 and the Dietrich story is pictures, and so we did this. 00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:05.000 So there you are. 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:08.000 Pure content and pure form, side by side. 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:11.000 No fighting, ladies. 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:13.000 "What's a Jurassic Park?" 00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:16.000 Now, what is the story here? 00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:19.000 Someone 00:04:19.000 --> 00:04:22.000 is re-engineering dinosaurs 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:25.000 by extracting their DNA 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:28.000 from prehistoric amber. 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:31.000 Genius! 00:04:31.000 --> 00:04:35.000 (Laughter) 00:04:35.000 --> 00:04:38.000 Now, luckily for me, 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:40.000 I live and work in New York City, 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:42.000 where there are plenty of dinosaurs. 00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:45.000 (Laughter) 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:49.000 So, 00:04:49.000 --> 00:04:51.000 I went to the Museum of Natural History, 00:04:51.000 --> 00:04:55.000 and I checked out the bones, and I went to the gift shop, 00:04:55.000 --> 00:04:56.000 and I bought a book. 00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:00.000 And I was particularly taken with this page of the book, 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:04.000 and more specifically the lower right-hand corner. 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:07.000 Now I took this diagram, 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:11.000 and I put it in a Photostat machine, 00:05:11.000 --> 00:05:17.000 (Laughter) 00:05:17.000 --> 00:05:20.000 and I took a piece of tracing paper, 00:05:20.000 --> 00:05:24.000 and I taped it over the Photostat 00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:27.000 with a piece of Scotch tape -- stop me if I'm going too fast -- 00:05:27.000 --> 00:05:34.000 (Laughter) 00:05:34.000 --> 00:05:37.000 and then I took a Rapidograph pen -- 00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:40.000 explain it to the youngsters -- 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:43.000 (Laughter) 00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:47.000 and I just started to reconstitute the dinosaur. 00:05:47.000 --> 00:05:50.000 I had no idea what I was doing, 00:05:50.000 --> 00:05:52.000 I had no idea where I was going, 00:05:52.000 --> 00:05:54.000 but at some point, I stopped -- 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:58.000 when to keep going would seem like I was going too far. 00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:02.000 And what I ended up with was a graphic representation 00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:06.000 of us seeing this animal coming into being. 00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:08.000 We're in the middle of the process. 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:11.000 And then I just threw some typography on it. 00:06:11.000 --> 00:06:13.000 Very basic stuff, 00:06:13.000 --> 00:06:16.000 slightly suggestive of public park signage. 00:06:16.000 --> 00:06:22.000 (Laughter) 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:24.000 Everybody in house loved it, 00:06:24.000 --> 00:06:26.000 and so off it goes to the author. 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:28.000 And even back then, 00:06:28.000 --> 00:06:30.000 Michael was on the cutting edge. 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:34.000 "Michael Crichton responds by fax:" 00:06:34.000 --> 00:06:36.000 "Wow! Fucking Fantastic Jacket" 00:06:36.000 --> 00:06:43.000 (Laughter) (Applause) 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:47.000 That was a relief to see that pour out of the machine. 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:50.000 (Laughter) 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:53.000 I miss Michael. 00:06:53.000 --> 00:06:56.000 And sure enough, somebody from MCA Universal 00:06:56.000 --> 00:06:59.000 calls our legal department to see if they can 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:01.000 maybe look into buying the rights to the image, 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:04.000 just in case they might want to use it. 00:07:04.000 --> 00:07:07.000 Well, they used it. 00:07:07.000 --> 00:07:12.000 (Laughter) (Applause) 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:15.000 And I was thrilled. 00:07:15.000 --> 00:07:17.000 We all know it was an amazing movie, 00:07:17.000 --> 00:07:19.000 and it was so interesting to see it 00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:23.000 go out into the culture and become this phenomenon 00:07:23.000 --> 00:07:26.000 and to see all the different permutations of it. 00:07:26.000 --> 00:07:29.000 But not too long ago, 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:32.000 I came upon this on the Web. 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:35.000 No, that is not me. 00:07:35.000 --> 00:07:38.000 But whoever it is, 00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:41.000 I can't help but thinking they woke up one day like, 00:07:41.000 --> 00:07:44.000 "Oh my God, that wasn't there last night. Ooooohh! 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:47.000 I was so wasted." 00:07:47.000 --> 00:07:50.000 (Laughter) 00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:53.000 But if you think about it, from my head 00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:56.000 to my hands to his leg. 00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:01.000 (Laughter) 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:04.000 That's a responsibility. 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:07.000 And it's a responsibility that I don't take lightly. 00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:10.000 The book designer's responsibility is threefold: 00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:14.000 to the reader, to the publisher and, most of all, to the author. 00:08:14.000 --> 00:08:17.000 I want you to look at the author's book 00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:20.000 and say, "Wow! I need to read that." 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:23.000 David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, 00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:26.000 and the title essay 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:29.000 in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony. 00:08:29.000 --> 00:08:31.000 And the reason he went is because 00:08:31.000 --> 00:08:33.000 he had a fear of his body image, 00:08:33.000 --> 00:08:36.000 and he wanted to explore what was underlying that. 00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:39.000 For me, it was simply an excuse to design a book 00:08:39.000 --> 00:08:42.000 that you could literally take the pants off of. 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:45.000 But when you do, 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:47.000 you don't get what you expect. 00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:49.000 You get something that goes much deeper than that. 00:08:49.000 --> 00:08:53.000 And David especially loved this design 00:08:53.000 --> 00:08:56.000 because at book signings, which he does a lot of, 00:08:56.000 --> 00:08:59.000 he could take a magic marker and do this. 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:05.000 (Laughter) 00:09:05.000 --> 00:09:08.000 Hello! 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:11.000 (Laughter) 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:14.000 Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:17.000 called ["Dry"], and it's about his time in rehab. 00:09:17.000 --> 00:09:22.000 In his 20s, he was a hotshot ad executive, 00:09:22.000 --> 00:09:25.000 and as Mad Men has told us, a raging alcoholic. 00:09:25.000 --> 00:09:28.000 He did not think so, however, 00:09:28.000 --> 00:09:31.000 but his coworkers did an intervention and they said, 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:35.000 "You are going to rehab, or you will be fired and you will die." 00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:39.000 Now to me, this was always going to be a typographic solution, 00:09:39.000 --> 00:09:41.000 what I would call the opposite of Type 101. 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:43.000 What does that mean? 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:45.000 Usually on the first day of Introduction to Typography, 00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:48.000 you get the assignment of, select a word 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:51.000 and make it look like what it says it is. So that's Type 101, right? 00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:53.000 Very simple stuff. 00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:56.000 This is going to be the opposite of that. 00:09:56.000 --> 00:09:59.000 I want this book to look like it's lying to you, 00:09:59.000 --> 00:10:03.000 desperately and hopelessly, the way an alcoholic would. 00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:06.000 The answer was the most low-tech thing you can imagine. 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:10.000 I set up the type, I printed it out on an Epson printer 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:13.000 with water-soluble ink, taped it to the wall 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:16.000 and threw a bucket of water at it. Presto! 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:18.000 Then when we went to press, 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:20.000 the printer put a spot gloss on the ink 00:10:20.000 --> 00:10:22.000 and it really looked like it was running. 00:10:22.000 --> 00:10:25.000 Not long after it came out, Augusten was waylaid in an airport 00:10:25.000 --> 00:10:27.000 and he was hiding out in the bookstore 00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:29.000 spying on who was buying his books. 00:10:29.000 --> 00:10:32.000 And this woman came up to it, 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:34.000 and she squinted, and she took it to the register, 00:10:34.000 --> 00:10:37.000 and she said to the man behind the counter, "This one's ruined." 00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:41.000 (Laughter) 00:10:41.000 --> 00:10:46.000 And the guy behind the counter said, "I know, lady. They all came in that way." 00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:51.000 (Laughter) 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:54.000 Now, that's a good printing job. 00:10:54.000 --> 00:10:57.000 A book cover 00:10:57.000 --> 00:11:00.000 is a distillation. 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:03.000 It is a haiku, 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:06.000 if you will, of the story. 00:11:06.000 --> 00:11:09.000 This particular story 00:11:09.000 --> 00:11:12.000 by Osama Tezuka 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:15.000 is his epic life of the Buddha, 00:11:15.000 --> 00:11:18.000 and it's eight volumes in all. But the best thing is 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:22.000 when it's on your shelf, you get a shelf life 00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:26.000 of the Buddha, moving from one age to the next. 00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:32.000 All of these solutions 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:36.000 derive their origins from the text of the book, 00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:39.000 but once the book designer has read the text, 00:11:39.000 --> 00:11:42.000 then he has to be an interpreter 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:45.000 and a translator. 00:11:45.000 --> 00:11:48.000 This story was a real puzzle. 00:11:48.000 --> 00:11:51.000 This is what it's about. 00:11:51.000 --> 00:11:54.000 "Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters." 00:11:54.000 --> 00:11:57.000 (Laughter) 00:11:57.000 --> 00:12:01.000 All right, so I got a collection of the paintings together 00:12:01.000 --> 00:12:03.000 and I looked at them and I deconstructed them 00:12:03.000 --> 00:12:05.000 and I put them back together. 00:12:05.000 --> 00:12:07.000 And so, here's the design, right? 00:12:07.000 --> 00:12:10.000 And so here's the front and the spine, and it's flat. 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:13.000 But the real story starts when you wrap it around a book and put it on the shelf. 00:12:13.000 --> 00:12:17.000 Ahh! We come upon them, 00:12:17.000 --> 00:12:20.000 the clandestine lovers. Let's draw them out. 00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:25.000 Huhh! They've been discovered by the sultan. 00:12:25.000 --> 00:12:28.000 He will not be pleased. 00:12:28.000 --> 00:12:31.000 Huhh! And now the sultan is in danger. 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:34.000 And now, we have to open it up 00:12:34.000 --> 00:12:37.000 to find out what's going to happen next. 00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:40.000 Try experiencing that on a Kindle. 00:12:40.000 --> 00:12:47.000 (Laughter) 00:12:47.000 --> 00:12:50.000 Don't get me started. 00:12:50.000 --> 00:12:53.000 Seriously. 00:12:53.000 --> 00:12:57.000 Much is to be gained by eBooks: 00:12:57.000 --> 00:13:00.000 ease, convenience, portability. 00:13:00.000 --> 00:13:03.000 But something is definitely lost: tradition, 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:08.000 a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness -- 00:13:08.000 --> 00:13:11.000 a little bit of humanity. 00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:14.000 Do you know what John Updike used to do 00:13:14.000 --> 00:13:16.000 the first thing when he would get a copy 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:18.000 of one of his new books from Alfred A. Knopf? 00:13:18.000 --> 00:13:21.000 He'd smell it. 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:25.000 Then he'd run his hand over the rag paper, 00:13:25.000 --> 00:13:28.000 and the pungent ink and the deckled edges of the pages. 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:33.000 All those years, all those books, he never got tired of it. 00:13:33.000 --> 00:13:37.000 Now, I am all for the iPad, 00:13:37.000 --> 00:13:41.000 but trust me -- smelling it will get you nowhere. 00:13:41.000 --> 00:13:44.000 (Laughter) 00:13:44.000 --> 00:13:47.000 Now the Apple guys are texting, 00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:50.000 "Develop odor emission plug-in." 00:13:50.000 --> 00:13:55.000 (Laughter) 00:13:55.000 --> 00:13:58.000 And the last story I'm going to talk about is quite a story. 00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:01.000 A woman 00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:04.000 named Aomame in 1984 Japan finds herself 00:14:04.000 --> 00:14:07.000 negotiating down a spiral staircase 00:14:07.000 --> 00:14:10.000 off an elevated highway. When she gets to the bottom, 00:14:10.000 --> 00:14:12.000 she can't help but feel that, all of a sudden, 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:14.000 she's entered a new reality 00:14:14.000 --> 00:14:17.000 that's just slightly different from the one that she left, 00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:19.000 but very similar, but different. 00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:22.000 And so, we're talking about parallel planes of existence, 00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:26.000 sort of like a book jacket and the book that it covers. 00:14:26.000 --> 00:14:29.000 So how do we show this? 00:14:29.000 --> 00:14:33.000 We go back to Hepburn and Dietrich, but now we merge them. 00:14:33.000 --> 00:14:37.000 So we're talking about different planes, different pieces of paper. 00:14:37.000 --> 00:14:40.000 So this is on a semi-transparent piece of velum. 00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:43.000 It's one part of the form and content. 00:14:43.000 --> 00:14:46.000 When it's on top of the paper board, 00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:49.000 which is the opposite, it forms this. 00:14:49.000 --> 00:14:53.000 So even if you don't know anything about this book, 00:14:53.000 --> 00:14:56.000 you are forced to consider a single person 00:14:56.000 --> 00:14:59.000 straddling two planes of existence. 00:14:59.000 --> 00:15:04.000 And the object itself invited exploration 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:09.000 interaction, consideration 00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:12.000 and touch. 00:15:12.000 --> 00:15:14.000 This debuted at number two 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:16.000 on the New York Times Best Seller list. 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:18.000 This is unheard of, 00:15:18.000 --> 00:15:20.000 both for us the publisher, and the author. 00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:22.000 We're talking a 900-page book 00:15:22.000 --> 00:15:24.000 that is as weird as it is compelling, 00:15:24.000 --> 00:15:26.000 and featuring a climactic scene 00:15:26.000 --> 00:15:28.000 in which a horde of tiny people 00:15:28.000 --> 00:15:30.000 emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl 00:15:30.000 --> 00:15:32.000 and cause a German Shepherd to explode. 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:40.000 (Laughter) 00:15:40.000 --> 00:15:43.000 Not exactly Jackie Collins. 00:15:43.000 --> 00:15:46.000 Fourteen weeks on the Best Seller list, 00:15:46.000 --> 00:15:49.000 eight printings, and still going strong. 00:15:49.000 --> 00:15:52.000 So even though we love publishing as an art, 00:15:52.000 --> 00:15:55.000 we very much know it's a business too, 00:15:55.000 --> 00:15:58.000 and that if we do our jobs right and get a little lucky, 00:15:58.000 --> 00:16:01.000 that great art can be great business. 00:16:01.000 --> 00:16:04.000 So that's my story. To be continued. 00:16:04.000 --> 00:16:07.000 What does it look like? 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:12.000 Yes. It can, it does and it will, 00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:15.000 but for this book designer, 00:16:15.000 --> 00:16:18.000 page-turner, 00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:21.000 dog-eared place-holder, 00:16:21.000 --> 00:16:24.000 notes in the margins-taker, 00:16:24.000 --> 00:16:27.000 ink-sniffer, 00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:31.000 the story looks like this. 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:34.000 Thank you. 00:16:34.000 --> 00:16:37.000 (Applause)