Chip Kidd Booklet

“A BOOK COVER IS A DISTILLATION. IT IS A HAIKU OF THE STORY” -CHIP KIDD Designed by Bailey Reynolds



BIOGRAPHY Chip Kidd is one of the most prolific book cover designers in American design history. Educated at Penn State, he started designing covers for Knopf in 1986, where he was responsible for 75 book covers a year. He is still employed at Knopf, an imprint of Random House, where he is an art director. He also oversees the production of comic book covers for Pantheon, another subsidy of Random House. His interest in comic books, graphic novels and pop culture have been a large influence on his work. He has published two books, Cheese Monkeys and The Learners, both of which he designed himself. The typography within the book is used to subtly, and sometimes blatantly, make points along side the narrative contained within. His highly productive career has allowed him to work with many celebrities and authors, including Frank Miller, Dean Koontz, John Updike and David Sedaris. His book covers continue to influence designers and pop culture and many of them are widely imitated.

ICONIC DESIGNS Naked by David Sedaris Naked, published in 1997, is about David Sedaris’ trip to a nudist colony to help him conquer his self-esteem issues. Chip Kidd wanted to create a book cover “that you could take the pants off.” When you take to book jacket off, you are left with an x-ray image of a human. Dry. by Augusten Burroughs Dry, published in 2003, is about Augusten Burroughs time in rehab as an alcoholic. Chip Kidd knew that he wanted this design to be just typography. Kidd states, “I want this book to look like it is lying to you. Desperately and hopelessly the way an alcoholic would”. He accomplished this by printing out the type with water-soluble ink, taped it to the wall, and threw a bucket of water at it. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami 1Q84, published in 2009, is about a woman in 1984 Japan named Aomame is walking down a spiral staircase and finds herself in what she believes is an alternate reality. Chip Kidd represented the theme in this book by printing off the jacket cover in velum, and underneath it has the exact opposite design creating the illusion of separate realities.





WELL KNOWN WORK Jurassic Park Jurassic Park by Micheal Crichton was published in 1990. Jurassic Park is about scientists reengineering dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from dinosaur amber and the events that unfold. Chip Kidd designed this cover by first going to the Museum of Natural History, where he studied the dinosaurs. He then went to the gift shop and bought a book that he could reference. He found himself most interested in one diagram of T-Rex bones. He took that diagram and put it in a photostat machine. He then taped a piece of transfer paper over the photostat and started to recreate the dinosaur on the transfer paper. He stated that he stopped when going any further would be too far and what he “ended up with was a graphic representation of us seeing this animal coming into being.” He then added some text that was more simple to represent what you might find at a park. In 1993 Universal Studios used Kidd’s graphic as part of the logo for the Jurassic Park movie.

CAREER 1986 Graduated from Penn State Unniversity Junior Assistant at Alfred A. Knoff Publishing House Designed First Jacket The Photographer’s Sourcebook of Creative Ideas 1990 Designed Jurassic Park Cover 1992 Designer First Illustrated Jacket Kicking Tomorrow 1996 Author and Designer of Batman Collected 2002 Wrote The Cheese Monkeys 2009 Wrote The Leaners 2013 Wrote Go: a Kidd’s to Graphic Design 2015 Designed A Strangeness In My Mind 2018 Designer and Co-Writer of Marvelocity: The Marvel Comics Art of Alex Ross



CLOSURE Chip Kidd is an incredible designer of thousands of books. He has design covers for many well-known titles. He has pioneered and changed the book design business forever. He is a great designer; he is also an author and one of the world’s leading expert on Batman. Chip Kidd is most well known for the book cover design for Jurassic Park. What an incredible career that is nowhere near over. What will he create next?

REFERENCES “Chip Kidd: Penguin Random House.” PenguinRandomhouse.com. Accessed April 17, 2021. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/68435/chip-kidd. Kidd, Chip. “Designing Books Is No Laughing Matter. OK, It Is.” TED. TED. Accessed April 17, 2021. https://www.ted.com/talks/chip_kidd_designing_books_is_no_laughing_mat- ter_ok_it_is?language=en#t-353096. Flask, Dominic. Chip Kidd : Design Is History. Accessed April 17, 2021. http://www.de- signishistory.com/1980/chip-kidd/. Stinson, Liz. “Chip Kidd, on Why Kids Should Learn About Graphic Design.” Wired. Conde Nast, October 5, 2018. https://www.wired.com/2013/09/qq-chipkidd/. “Who Designed It? The Iconic Covers of Chip Kidd.” Sessions College, May 14, 2020. https://www.sessions.edu/notes-on-design/who-designed-it-the-iconic-covers-of-chip- kidd/.

B“OYOesK, S. You know, the bound volumes filled with ink on paper. You can not turn them off with a switch. TELL YOUR KIDS.” -Chip Kidd