Artist of the day: Artist of the day, June 26: Chip Kidd, American graphic designer

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Artist of the day, June 26: Chip Kidd, American graphic designer

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

Chip Kidd grew up to be an associate art director at the New York publishing house, Knopf. He was hired at the publishing house as a junior assistant in 1986. Besides, Kidd freelanced for various firms and produced more than 70 book jackets per year. Some of the publishing houses he freelanced for included Farrar Straus & Giroux, Amazon, HarperCollins, Scribner and Penguin/Putnam. At Pantheon Book he designed the graphic novels.

In 2003, he collaborated with an American cartoonist and editor, Art Spiegelman, on Jack Cole’s biography, titled Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. Jack Cole was a renowned American cartoonist best known for his creation of comic superhero, Plastic Man. Furthermore, Kidd created cover concepts for some of the most popular novelists and author of the generation. The film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novel featured Kidd’s concept art for the novel. Other famous authors, Oliver Sacks and Lisa Birnbach, also requested his expertise for their books’ covers.

Chip Kidd has presented lectures at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, RISD, and numerous other institutions, including the 2012 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference, resulting in a TED Talk web video: “Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is,” that has over 1,775,000 hits and counting. He also returned to Penn State recently, where he presented his lecture, “Fail Better.”

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