Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd — legal first name Charles — was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1964. He studied graphic design at Pennsylvania State University under Lanny Sommese, graduating in 1986. At 22 he took a junior design job at Alfred A. Knopf in New York under then-art-director Sara Eisenman. He has been there ever since.

Kidd’s first influential jacket was Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park in 1990 — a skeletal T-Rex line drawing on black. Crichton fought Knopf for a photographic cover; Kidd’s sparser mark won. When Universal licensed the jacket as the basis for the film’s logo three years later, Kidd became the first jacket designer whose work most people had seen before they ever saw the book.

From 1990 Kidd became Haruki Murakami’s English-language jacket designer, producing the covers for every Murakami book Knopf has published, through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) and 1Q84 (2011) and beyond. He became art director for David Sedaris, Cormac McCarthy (for The Road, 2006), Dean Koontz, Elmore Leonard and dozens more.

A parallel career runs in graphic novels: Kidd has edited the Pantheon Graphic Novels line since the mid-1990s, commissioning work from Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, 2000), Daniel Clowes (Ice Haven, 2005), Charles Burns (Black Hole, 2005) and Art Spiegelman (In the Shadow of No Towers, 2004).

Kidd is also a novelist (The Cheese Monkeys, 2001; The Learners, 2008) and a children’s book author (Go, 2013; Pow! Bam! Wow!, 2017). His 2012 TED talk, “Go Ahead, Judge My Book by its Cover”, has been viewed several million times and is the most-cited public statement on book-jacket design.

Kidd’s position — stated in his 2012 TED talk and throughout his lectures — is that a book jacket is a first line of argument for the content, not a decorative wrapper. The jacket’s job is to give the reader just enough to commit; too little is forgettable, too much is pre-digested.

“Design in the absence of content is decoration.” — Jeffrey Zeldman, quoted by Kidd as his working maxim

Three commitments organise the work. First, read the book first. Kidd is famous within Knopf for reading every manuscript before designing its jacket — a habit he picked up from Carol Devine Carson (Knopf’s current creative director) and one that almost nobody else in trade publishing still does.

Second, keep one strong idea. Kidd’s strongest jackets — the Jurassic Park skeleton, Murakami’s die-cut windows, McCarthy’s stripped typography — carry a single idea. Concepts, not compositions, survive the bookshop shelf.

Third, typography is character. Kidd treats typeface choice as casting: the book’s protagonist is the type. The Road’s display is gaunt and damaged. Naked’s is clinical. 1Q84’s is hidden inside vellum because the novel is about hiddenness.