Chip Kidd

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[Stories] all need to look like something, they all need a face

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hip Kidd works for Alfred A. Knopf and has been since 1986. Working for Knopf is what led to his career in designing book covers. His work doing this job made him a superstar in the book designing industry. Although all of Kidd’s books are all different, the way he approaches every design is the same. He tries to convey the message of each book into a single design. Kidd doesn’t bring his own personal style or preferences into the creation progress. Instead he develops a cover based on the author’s style, and lets the book speak for itself. Kidd considers himself a translator, he condenses the message and story of the book and makes it visual.

When Chip Kidd is at a loss for ideas, he turns to the outside world for inspiration. Sometimes he gains ideas by accident. Kidd never turns his brain off and is always looking for a new ideas and new ways to solve problems. Sometimes the way to solve a problem is to use yourself as inspiration.

Kidd can often be found in the covers he designs.

Even though he puts forth serious effort to make every cover different, a few similar ones will slip through the cracks.

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uthor, Mark Salzman wrote two novels, three years apart, that share a similar theme. Both novels are in the perspective of someone who lives in a walled community, wears a uniform matching everyone else’s, eats in silences, and can only leave if permitted. In Lying Awake, the character is a nun living in a nunnery. True Notebooks portrays a character of a teenager in prison. These similar covers received drastically different feedback from readers. Lying Awake sold incredibly well while True Notebooks barely sold at all. The cover for Lying Awake portrayed the bond between the material world and the spiritual world through its use of an elegant font and earthy colors.

While the blocky font and mix of vibrant colors clashing with the black and white photo used on the True Notebooks cover expressed the complexity of the novel. Salzman said, “the sales figures show that acknowledging complexity did for True Notebooks what it did for John Kerry”.

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Reusing an old style to portray a similar message, if it’s intentional or not, doesn’t always work.

Kidd hitting this similarity bump doesn’t discredit the immense success with designing drastically different covers dealing with similar content.

When working with the theme of radios and radio stations, the covers hold different meaning.

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embarassingly similar

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hip Kidd gives each book a personal style and voice based on the writing. He lets the covers speak for the story. Kidd also gives the reader the benefit of the doubt especially when designing the cover for Micheal Crichton’s Jurassic Park: The Lost World. He used a design related to the first book to give readers the visual cue that this was the sequel, without actually saying the name of the book.

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etting the book speak for itself can often spark a curiosity in the viewer so they will pick up the book to find out more. With the novel Dry by Augusten Burroughs , the cover look like it’s wet because the ink on the cover looks like it’s bleeding due to water exposure. This makes the viewer question why the cover would look wet when the novel is titled Dry. The novel is about the author’s fight with alcoholism. The author writes about how he would lie to his family and friends by telling them he’s okay, and doesn’t need help. Kidd wanted to capture the lying nature of an alcoholic, by making the cover look like it’s lying to you. He fulfilled his idea in a very unique way. All of Kidd’s ideas seem genius, like they come to him naturally but Kidd will often use the outside world as inspiration.

speaking for themselves

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the world’s inspriation

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aining inspiration from the world around you and using that inspiration to create your own ideas is a wonderful tool to use, especially when designing. The outside world is full of little bits of information one could use to make something fantastic. Chip Kidd has had great success utilizing this tool. When designing the cover for the novel Fraud by David Rakoff, Kidd stated he gained inspiration from ‘editorial graffiti’ he found in the New York subway. The cover obviously reflects this idea and the design works well with the book as a whole.

Inspiration doesn’t always come instantaneously, sometimes one must go looking for it. Searching for ideas came into play when Kidd was working on the cover for Perfidia by James Ellroy. The novel is about a Japanese-American detective in Los Angeles in the 1940s, then Pearl Harbor is attacked. Kidd decided to take the obvious and literal approach and put a picture of Pearl Harbor above a picture of Los Angeles. Kidd’s publisher thought he could do better and asked him to redo the cover. When Kidd was leaving work one day he found inspiration in something he used everyday, a giant red exit button. Kidd found inspiration in something he had never thought twice about, something so mundane became the idea he used for the book cover.

Kidd may sometimes have to look and look for inspiration but sometimes finding new ideas is as easy as looking in a mirror. Which is exactly how Kidd came up with the idea for the cover of Gulp

by Mary Roach . He used a photo of himself as the foundation of the book cover, and had an illustration made of an open mouth. Not only is Chip Kidd an inspiration to his own work, but sometimes he’s featured in his designs.

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Photo inspiration for the for the illustration of the cover of Gulp

Final book cover of Gulp written by Mary Roach

Chip Kidd’s original book cover

‘Editorial graffiti’ Photo Credit: Chip Kidd

Exit button used as inspiration Photo Credit: Chip Kidd

Piece of paper with the author’s name

Final book cover of Perferdia written by James Ellroy

Final book cover for Fraud,

by David Rakoff

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do it yourself

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hip Kidd is the kind of person to use any excuse to be in front of a camera. Chip has featured in dozens of his own designs because, as Kidd says, “Why pay a model’s fee when you can do it yourself”. This is especially true in his cover for Walter Winchell by Michael Herr. The figure on the cover is a silhouette of Kidd. This full image of Kidd is rare, his usual appearances are his hands and fingers, and in one case part if his face. For the cover of the novel Dreamer by Jack Butler, Kidd put his face on a scanner. Then took the scan into Photoshop and color edited the scan so it was only made of vibrant, unnatural colors.

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Sources

www.chipkidd.com

Chip Kidd: Book One: Work: 1986–2006 www.ted.com

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Designed and written by Riley Silva Composed in Times, typefaces designed

by Stanley Morison in 1929, and and Helvetica, typefaces designed by Max Miedinger in 1957 Copyright Š 2017 Riley Silva, Portland, Maine, Maine College of Art.