Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd
Kidd at a June 2012 book signing at Midtown Comics in Manhattan
Born	Charles Kidd 1964 (age 52–53) Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation	Graphic designer, writer
Notable credit(s)	Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, The Cheese Monkeys, The Learners, Bat-Manga!
Website	ChipKidd.com

Charles (Chip) Kidd (born September 12, 1964) is an American graphic designer, best known for his innovative book covers. Based in New York city, Kidd has become one of the most famous book cover designers to date.

Born in Shillington, Berks Country, Pennsylvania, 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. Kidd attended Pennsylvania State University, where he graduated in 1986 with a degree in graphic design.

Throughout his career, Kidd has been a graphic designer, book designer, editor, author, lecturer and musician. According to Graphic Design: American Two, he has been credited with “helping to spawn a revolution in the art of America book packaging in the last ten years.” One of the most consistent characteristics of Kidd’s revolutionary 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 effective solutions aren’t dictated by style.”

Kidd is currently the associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He first joined the Knopf design team in 1986, when he was hired as a junior assistant. Turning out jacket designs at an average of 75 covers a year, Kidd has freelanced for Amazon, Doubleday, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Grove Press, HarperCollins, Penguin/Putnam, Scribner and Columbia University Press, in addition to his work for Knopf. Kidd also supervised graphic novels at Pantheon, and in 2003 he collaborated with Art Spiegelman on a biography of cartoonist Jack Cole, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. His output includes cover concepts for books by Mark Beyer, Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Frank Miller, Michael Ondaatje, Alex Ross, Charles Schulz, Osamu Tezuka, Gengoroh Tagame, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, John Updike and many others. His 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 adaptation. Oliver Sacks and other authors have contract clauses stating that Kidd design their book covers. 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.”