Chip Kidd: Between covers

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2002 by Coupland, Ken

Chip Kidd: Between Covers One of the book trade's premier form-givers is moonlighting as a storyteller. But his first novel

is more than just a good yarn. It's also a primer on the education of a designer.

He's been called "the closest thing to a rock star in the ratified world of high-end graphic design." It's been said that his work, mainly book jacket design for his long-time employer, esteemed publisher Alfred A. Knopf, "helped spawn a revolution in the art of American book packaging." Now Chip Kidd's a budding novelist as well. Last fall, Scribner and Sons released The Cheese Monkeys, Kidd's enigmatically titled, black-comic novel set in the forbidding terrain of a regional design school. It's a promising debut for a novice writer who's made a career of designing for other writers.

A smallish, perpetually alert brunet wearing a colorful knitted sweater that gives him a boyish look, Kidd in person is a dialed-- down version of the fey passive-aggressive he portrays-much to the amusement of audiences-on the design lecture circuit. On the bookshelves of a tastefully appointed office that feels more like his personal den, Kidd has arranged a procession of titles-front covers turned to the viewer-from the blockbuster novels of Michael Crichton and Anne Rice, to "name" authors like Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, along with a smattering of non-fiction and books by lesser-known writers.

As a guest gingerly repositions various papers and wardrobe items to clear a perch on the office's sole available chair, Kidd, 37, cheerfully expounds on a career that to date has resulted in the single-- handed creation of some 1,500 book covers for Knopf and other houses. It's no exaggeration to say that his highly expressive, quirkily conceptual cover treatments-their messages leavened with off-- beat imagery and in-jokes-have literally redefined the medium. Kidd's signature style is now so frequently imitated that it's sometimes hard to remember just how muddled and uninspired most American book cover design was until he came along.

Book covers occupy a peculiar niche in the design world. Once a staple of publishing but oftentimes ignored, the dust jacket first emerged as a product that was part marketing, part packaging. Routinely dismissed as a disposable item-something you threw away as soon as you got its contents home-the book cover itself has, with rare exceptions, historically been a design black hole.

Kidd changed all that with a succession of widely influential book jackets that alternated strikingly spare cover treatments with what Veronique Vienne, in Graphic Design: America Two, called "flea market clutter." Sometimes a Kidd creation is notable for its high-concept image. At other times-usually on so-called "mid-list" titles that can't expect to find much of an audience-the cover is intriguing for its wacky juxtaposition of off-beat iconography. "I love those crazy images you would never think of using unless they hit you over the head," he says of one particularly unnerving cover treatment. "If you couldn't possibly have conceived of commissioning it, it's probably worth going with."

Warming to his subject, Kidd allows that, when he's designing a cover, the demands of the marketplace are never far from his thoughts. He's adept at crystallizing a book's major themes into a single image that broadcasts a message, without giving away all its secrets at first blush. Faced with yet another bestseller, "The hardest thing to do," he says, "is to take something that you already know ahead of time is going to be big and commercial, and somehow try to make it look different, interesting-to give it some kind of design integrity."

Fine and dandy, but just the sort of thing to give a marketing department nightmares. Luckily for Kidd, he reports directly to Knopf head honcho Sonny Mehta, in what-contrary to Kidd's mordant characterizations of his boss in lectures he's given-- appears to be a convivial working relationship. Partly, no doubt, that's because Kidd is given remarkably free rein. "Fortunately, this is not a democracy here," he explains. "I don't want everyone having a say in what I do, because that's the death of good design."

Barbara de Wilde has had an unusually long and close relationship with Kidd; they went to college together, she worked with him at Knopf for 12 years, and the pair taught together at the School of Visual Arts for another six. She attests to the well-nigh-alchemical process that Kidd follows to create a book cover. "He's very secretive and very private," de Wilde, now design director for Martha Stewart Living, observes. "I always used to know when he was working on something that was really good, because he wouldn't show it to anyone."

Kidd admits to the occasional hurdle when a design gets approval from the editorial end, only to run into objections from the author, or when permissions prove to be a problem. It's no surprise that covers which flow smoothly from concept to execution are those that he considers most successful. But some assignments have been successful in unexpected ways that, for Kidd, still rankle.