We rarely leave New York, unless it's to go to far more temperate climates with a lot of sharks (land and water). So while we've been following Chip Kidd's all-America book tour trajectory in our increasingly unironic Chip Kidd-a-thon, we've always found it impossible to actually go to one of his talks. Which is why we were psyched psyched psyched when a reader, Stephanie, wrote in a full report of her Midwestern encounter with the man himself.

Dear Unbeige,

I live in Indiana, where design excitement is few and far between. So, I took the opportunity to go listen to this guy named Chipp Kid. I had heard a bit about him from you guys (and those cool folks over at Speak Up and Design Observer), but I didn't really know much about his work. Well, his work rocks and his presentation rocked. There was lots of rocking going on, although not in the musical sense.

One of the best parts of the evening was the title of his presentation. He hates presentation titles, so he just chooses a nice nugget of a phrase that he runs across. Last night it was from a review of a Celine Dione show in Vegas: "A style gland has become malignant in Nevada".

A tid-bit: Chipp Kidd had no plans to make a horizontal, page exploding retrospective book. He figured the book would be vertical so the book covers would fit in. Well, whoever asked him to publish the retrospective said, and I paraphrase, "Absolutely not! The book should be horizontal so you can show the cover, and then source material next to it."

We had no idea. Thank you, Stephanie. We like learning.

But, as it always turns out, there's no such thing as a free party report:

Well, since ya'll seem to always be rubbing elbows with the "fabulous and famous" of the design world, I have a favor. Convince them all they need to visit the Midwest more. Yeah, yeah, I know, they'd visit if someone paid them and if we really care, we'd move to New York or whatever. Come on, some of us are STUCK in the Midwest and need a visit as a reprieve from the real world.

Also, tell all those AIGA bigwigs that I KNOW you KNOW, that AIGA needs Chicago conferences.

Later Gators,
Stephanie

This is where we use our tremendous influence and pull within the design community and tell the AIGA that we are 100% behind Stephanie and they should really go to the midwest.

Because we lived in Indiana once too, and we wish we'd been saved.