CHIP KIDD AMERICAN GRAPHIC DESIGNER
BIOGRAPHY • Charles Kidd was born in 1964 in Reading, Pennsylvania, US. • Graduated in 1986 at Pennsylvania State University with a degree in Graphic Design. • Known for book covers, Kidd has been also an editor, author, lecturer, and musician. • He has been working at Knopf/Pantheon Graphic Novels for 34 years. He started a junior assistant after graduation, and now he is editor and art director. • Recipient of the National Design Award for Communications, and his TED Talk has been viewed over 1.6 million times.
INFLUENCES • Kidd grew up being fascinated and heavily inspired by American popular culture. • Comic books were his gateway into graphic design, with Batman and Superman populating some of his earliest childhood memories.
HIS MOST FAMOUS DESIGN Kidd’s most notable book cover design was for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel, which was so successful that it carried over into marketing for the film.
He has been credited with “helping to spawn a revolution in the art of America book packaging in the last ten years.�
HIS PROCESS
“It’s very organic, it’s very intuitive. I think personally for me living and working in NYC is very important in terms of visual stimulation, and going to museums and galleries, and having friends who are artists, and then studying the history of graphic design which for me was crucial. That’s one of my main suggestions to students.”
“The spines are very important for physical books because often books get self and after they are bought and read, this is how they live visually. So it’s important to make a spine as distinctive as you can.”
TIME MAGAZINE
THE NEW TESTAMENT “I got quite a few difficult assignments at this point, but I had to redesign the Bible, more specifically the New Testament…
…and certainly, trying to design covers for your own books I find very difficult.”
HIS CHARACTERISTIC One of the most consistent characteristics of Kidd’s style is the fact that his book covers don’t carry one signature look, as he states: “A signature look is crippling… [because]
the simplest and most effective solutions aren’t dictated by style.”
MORE BOOK COVERS
SOME BOOKS PUBLISHED AS AUTHOR • Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design
It is the first book to teach graphic design to children and has over 60,000 copies in print.
• The Cheese Monkey
It is a National Best Seller. It is an academic satire and a coming-of-age tale about state college art students who struggle to meet the demands of a sadistic graphic design instructor.
• The Learners
It finds the protagonist of The Cheese Monkeys drawn into the infamous Milgram experiment, thanks to an incidental newspaper ad assignment. The novel uses the experiment as an extended metaphor for advertising, wherein the "content" is masked and fed—sometimes unwillingly— to its consumers.
• Kidd’s influence on the book-jacket has been amply noted – Time Out New York has said that “the history of book design can be split into two eras: before graphic designer Chip Kidd and after.” • USA Today also 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.”
“I’m very much against the idea that the cover will sell the book. Marketing departments of publishing houses tend to latch onto this concept, and they can’t let go. But it’s about whether the book itself really connects with the public, and the cover is only a small part of that.” “Along the way, I may or may not involve photographers or illustrators or any amount of ephemeral detritus that washes up on my shores in the pursuit of solving the problem. And that is what it always amounts to visually solving a problem.” This solution can take up to six months to find.
INTERESTING LINKS • Chip Kidd’s Website http://chipkidd.com/home/ • The Hilarious Art of Book Design https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC0KxNeLp1E • The Art of First Impressions — in Design and Life https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nI65jgHG9o • Hammer Museum – UCLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Lk5m7O2II • His Process - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGunvu4T5kU • Advice for Students - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4njGOdIZWU • Chip Kidd Pays Homage in Book Cover Design https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTFmAreFh9Y • Design Methodology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_O0NT8Y740 • Conversations from Penn State https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3IidTc7f7s • Chip Kidd: AGI Open London https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05l8bLRLdPU