Chip Kidd is an influential American graphic designer, author, and editor, best known for his innovative book cover designs. Kidd’s career took off when he joined Alfred A. Knopf in 1986. His journey into the world of book design began serendipitously when he was assigned to work on a book cover for Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in 1990. The iconic T-Rex skeleton cover marked the beginning of Kidd’s groundbreaking work in the field. He later worked on the poster for the film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s The Lost World.
Throughout the 1990s, Chip Kidd continued to revolutionize book cover design, challenging traditional norms and introducing a more artistic and conceptual approach. Some of his notable works from this period include covers for Dry (Augusteen Burroughs) and Naked (David Sedaris).
In addition to his role as a graphic designer, Kidd also explored writing. In 2001, he published The Cheese Monkeys, a novel that drew inspiration from his experiences in art school. Since then, he has authored two artist monographs: Book One and Book Two.
In addition to his design work, Chip Kidd is a prominent speaker and advocate for visual communication. His 2012 TED Talk about cover design has been viewed over 2.7 million times. You can take his popular class on comic book design via Domestika called Unleash Your Super Designer.
In 2011, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 was released and became an instant sensation, in both the literary world and the print design world. The delicate jacket design, which used transparent vellum paper, delighted readers.
Kidd discusses how he designed the jacket on Haruki Murakami’s website:
Upon reading the manuscript, it soon occurred to me that the duality of Aomame’s situation could be represented by an interaction of the book’s jacket with the binding/cover underneath. By using a semi-transparent vellum for the jacket, and printing the woman’s image in a positive/negative scheme with the title on the outside layer and the rest of her on the binding, once the jacket is wrapped around the book it ‘completes’ the picture of her face. But something odd is definitely going on, and before the reader even reads a word, he or she is forced to consider the idea of someone going from one plane of existence to another.
