Chip Kidd

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chip Kidd (born 1964) is an American author, editor and graphic designer, best known for his innovative book covers.

Born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, Kidd grew up in a Philadelphia suburb, strongly influenced by American popular culture. While a design student at Penn State, an art instructor once gave the assignment to design a book cover for Museums and Women by John Updike, who is also a Shillington native. The teacher panned Kidds work in front of the class, suggesting that book design would not be a good career choice for him. However, Kidd later received professional assignments to design covers for Memories of the Ford Administration and other books by Updike.

Kidd is currently associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He first joined the Knopf design team in 1986, when he was hired as a junior assistant by Sara Eisenman. Publishers Weekly described his book jackets as "creepy, striking, sly, smart, unpredictable covers that make readers appreciate books as objects of art as well as literature." USA Today called him "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design today, while author James Ellroy has called him “the world’s greatest book-jacket designer.” [1]

Turning out jacket designs at an average of 75 a year, Kidd freelanced for Doubleday, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Grove Press, HarperCollins, Penguin/Putnam, Scribner and Columbia University Press in addition to his work for Knopf. His output includes cover concepts for books by Mark Beyer, Bret Easton Ellis, Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Frank Miller, Michael Ondaatje, Alex Ross, Charles Schulz, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, John Updike and others. His design for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel was carried over into marketing for the film adaptation. Oliver Sacks and other authors have contract clauses stating that Kidd design their books.

His novel The Cheese Monkeys (Simon and Schuster, 2001) is an academic satire and coming-of-age tale about state college art students who struggle to meet the demands of sadistic art instructors. The book draws on Kidd's real-life experiences during his art studies at Penn State.

Kidd also supervises graphic novels at Pantheon, and in 2003 he collaborated with Art Spiegelman on a biography of cartoonist Jack Cole, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits.

Kidd lives in Manhattan and Stonington, CT, with poet J.D. McClatchy. A biographical survey, Chip Kidd by Veronique Vienne (Yale University Press, 2003), was followed by Chip Kidd: Book One, Work: 1986 - 2006 (Rizzoli, 2005), curated and designed by Mark Melnick with text by Kidd.