Sponsored Content WEBINAR: ELECTION 2008: E-mail Tips from a Political Insider   WEBINAR: Becoming the Illusionist: The Magic of Using "Brand" to Drive Response without Results Disappearing in the Process   WEBINAR: Score and Win Through Cooperation   TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Holiday's are prime-time for email marketing - maximize your ROI by getting to the inbox   ON DEMAND WEBINAR--MASTER CLASS: High Performance Online and Off-line Strategies for Large Scale Customer Acquisition   FREE WHITE PAPER - Direct Mail and the Internet Find any supplier you need - agencies, CRM, fulfillment, lists, e-commerce, paper, printers, telemarketing, and more. Featured Categories Lists and Data Telemarketing Database Marketing E-commerce Web Marketing Agency & Creative Services Print, Production & Paper Lists and Data Processing :: view all categories Get free access to more than 50,000 list data cards - one of the most comprehensive databases in the industry. >> Search Now DIRECT Buzz Blog Webinars Buyer's Guide Calculators JobZone ListFinder Promo Calendar Research Store E-Newsletters Print Magazine This Month in Direct Magazine Bare Bones Postal reform works. The rate hike that takes effect May 12 is the lowest in memory: an average of 2.88%. And some mail classes are getting even less than that... See Full April Issue

Beginning writers typically are advised to write about what they know. That's a lesson Chip Kidd took to heart.

Kidd is best known as a graphic designer and is acclaimed for his work creating book jackets for titles by authors like Michael Crichton, Brad Meltzer, Sidney Lumet, Dean Koontz and a library of others.

For his second novel, “The Learners” (Scribner), Kidd sets his hero Happy to work as a young art assistant at a small Connecticut advertising agency in the early 1960s. Along the way, Happy designs a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment by Yale's psychology department, and ultimately responds to the ad himself.

The book, a sequel to Kidd's debut novel “The Cheese Monkeys,” should be of great interest to direct marketers, particularly those on the creative side.

One character uses the term “adversitorial dilemma” when working on a problem for a client. Don't you wish you coined that one? There's also looks into the fictional agency's relationships with clients (some good, some bad), and some takes on the process of coming up with ideas that DMers will nod their heads in familiarity with as they read.

One sentiment that unfortunately also may sound a little too familiar is Happy's opinion of direct mail, which comes to the surface when a client considers trying it after a print ad's response drops.

I hated direct mail, but hate wasn't a strong enough word. Direct mailing pieces were the uninvited guests of advertising. Straight into the garbage. Ads needed to be attached to something — magazines, television, newspapers — anything that made them a legitimate part of the show. Otherwise they were diseases without hosts.

Ouch. But what's interesting is that otherwise, so much of the book could be considered pro-DM, albeit not at all intentionally.

The newspaper ad Happy creates for the Yale study is purely direct response, down to having a coupon respondents can send in. And the book notes that the ad's purpose is to start a conversation with a consumer, which is exactly what needs to happen in good direct response. The Yale experiment is a main part of the story. And isn't experimentation just another way to do a test, another core concept of direct marketing?

There's a level of detail to the creative process — down to what type of inking pen a character is using — that only another designer could appreciate. Yale's ad is given a full page in the book, and every line, typeface, layout and spacing decision is dissected, A reader quickly realizes that when Happy says graphic designers see the world as “one big problem to solve, one typeface, one drawing, one image at a time,” Kidd is speaking for himself as well. Treatises written from the perspective of “irony” and “content” at times feel a little like pieces Kidd wrote to amuse himself and play with the form rather than to move the story along.

Not that there's a problem with that. While there's no human romance in the book, “The Learners” is a bit of a love letter to the idea of words as elements in a design and the fact that people need to be careful about the words they use.

And since this is a Chip Kidd book, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the cover, which is one of the most striking you'll see on the new releases shelf. In this case, it's OK to judge the book by its cover.