Identity ideas from The Cheese Monkeys (by Chip Kidd)

Pg 44 – “Oh, why can’t the world be interesting?”

Pg 44 – “The Venus de Milo. Do you really think anyone would give a good whoop about it if it was intact? Okay, maybe it would still be stuffed away in some museum, but we wouldn’t know about it. I wouldn’t be talking about it right now. It – she’s in our heads because she has personality…What she’s missing intensifies the effect of what she’s got.”

Interesting idea that what we are missing makes more important the things that we have. In terms of identity, it means that the identity we have is not the important piece ourselves, it is the identity we lack that people notice. For instance, in college students, those things that do not fit are the ones that we notice more than those that do fit. It seems a pretty universal theme, the more you do like others the less you are noticed. In terms of identity loss, if you lose the parts of you that make you stand out are you completely losing yourself, or are you gaining a part of someone else. Can you adapt to another person’s identity? Can you gain a piece of identity that is not yours? Like picking up language that you would not use had you not heard another person use it. For instance, all the people who say “That’s hot” after Paris Hilton used it over and over again on television. Did they lose a portion of their identity? Or did they gain a piece or Paris’s identity?

Pg 104 – “You are a designer. You have to eat the world with your eyes. You must look at everything as if you’re going to die in the next five minutes, because in the relative scheme of things, you are.”

Pg 106-7 – “…Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas. One natters on and on, the other actually has something to say. They use the same tools – words, pictures, colors. The difference, as you’ll be seeing, and as you’ll be showing me, is how.”

Pg 107 – “Even though it’s existed since the dawn of man, it’s also in its infancy – not even a name for it until 1928, when a book designer named William Addison Dwiggins changed it – in print, naturally. And he was right. It’s not Art. And Art is not Design, though it used to be.”

Pg 107 – “Design is, literally, purposeful planning Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take.”

Pg 108 – “Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence – once they became an option – the mutated…into a form of expression. And Art for its own sake, God help us, was born.”

Pg 108 – “But Graphic Design for its own sake will never happen, because the concept cancels itself out – a poster about nothing other than itself is not Graphic Design, it’s…makin’ ART.”

Pg 109 – “Design must always be in service to solving a problem, or it’s not Design.”

This thought could also be applied to identity, in terms of identity design. With this sort of knowledge identity design “must always be in service to solving a problem” the problem would just be the issue of a person’s identity. Sometimes this might occur when a student first goes to college and their identity at that time does not mesh with others. When this happens one might start to design a new/reformed model of their own identity to solve the problem of not fitting in or not being the person they desire to be. Really, in terms of identity atrophy (still working on a new term for atrophy, since it does not sound completely right yet) maybe identity design is a part of the atrophying process. Perhaps the opposite of identity atrophy (the loss/deconstruction of one identity) is identity design (the conscious creation of a new/reformed identity).

Pg 177 – “…Graphic Design, if you wield it effectively, is Power. Power to transmit ideas that change everything. Power that can destroy an entire race or save a nation from despair.”

Going back to the idea of identity design being like graphic design. If graphic design is power, then so is identity design. The difference being, while graphic design gives one the “Power to transmit ideas that change everything. Power that can destroy an entire race or save a nation from despair.” Identity design is power to change one’s own personal ideas and heritage. Power that can destroy/atrophy one identity or start a whole new culture through one’s own personal heritage.

The Cheese Monkeys; Chip Kidd; Harper Perennial; NY; 2001