Great Minds: Under the Covers with Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd’s home and office walk the fine line between collectible and cluttered, full of comic books, action figures, and other “Kidd-friendly” paraphernelia. The ad artists in Mad Men wouldn’t be caught dead with a collectible lunchbox, but Kidd displays his front and center.

Kidd isn’t a hoarder–he’s an award-winning book cover designer for Knopf, and has created both fiction and nonfiction covers for authors such as John Updike, Katharine Hepburn, Cormac McCarthy, David Sedaris, Neil Gaiman, and countless others. He’s perhaps most famous for his iconic Jurassic Park cover–one that Michael Crichton prophetically called a “F***ing Fantastic Jacket”.

These covers range from mysterious and thought-provoking to silly and playful, but the one thing they are not is boring. By bringing a sense of wonder and ease of experimentation to the drawing board, Kidd consistently creates stunning works of art that are as meaningful and diverse as they are numerous.

Kidd’s secret is simple: he loves the books he works on, and he feels a responsibility to create a cover that lives up to the book’s quality. He sees his covers as portals into the author’s world. “A book cover is a distillationm,” Kidd says in his 2012 TED talk (posted below). “It is a haiku, if you will, of the story… My job is to ask one question: what do the stories look like? I want you to look at the author’s book and say, ‘Wow, I need to read that.'”

In his quest to create his “haikus”, Kidd constantly reimagines what’s possible in the simple span of front to spine to back. For Augusten Burrough’s memoir Dry, Kidd printed out the text out and threw a bucket of water on it, creating the sensation that the dripping ink was still wet. For David Rakoff’s Fraud, he simply printed the author’s name and scrawled, in a a fat red marker, the word FRAUD overtop. For David Sedaris’s Naked, the dustjacket–hosting a picture of men’s boxers–can be removed to reveal an x-ray of a man’s waist. “It was simply an excuse to design a book you could literally take the pants off of,” Kidd explains in his talk. “But when you don’t get what you expect–you get something much that goes much deeper.”

And that’s his philosophy. To him, the art of book cover design goes much deeper than what you see. It must make the reader fall in love with the book before they even open it. It’s his underlying principles that have made Chipp Kidd somewhat of a rock star in the book and design worlds, and that have allowed him to so easily move from designing a cover for a Nobel laureate or a Pulitzer Prize-winning author to a Batman comic anthology to his own children’s book (Go! A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design). And it is hard to argue with him when he holds up, perhaps, a book with removable underpants, and says, “Try experiencing that on a Kindle!”

See Chip Kidd’s full TED talk here: