What do the books above have in common? As you may guess by this post’s title, their jackets were designed by Chip Kidd. That’s more than I thought I’d have on my shelves. But Kidd’s designed at least 800 jackets, according to his autobiography/retrospective, Chip Kidd: Book One, so the odds were good I’d have a few. At least one I hate: that wooden head sculpture on Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002) freaks me out and the arced type already seems dated. And at least one I’ve always liked: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) and its juxtaposition of a small segment from a lush Bosch mural atop a grainy black-and-white photo of a nomad in a sandstorm.
His most famous design was for Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. You remember it: white jacket, blue title, red author name, a T. Rex skeleton silhouette and nothing else. Kidd drew every bone himself with a Rapidiograph mechanical pen and although he conducted research on dinosaur anatomy at the American Museum of Natural History, he reveals the skeleton is “cheated,” simplified and exaggerated in parts for dramatic impact. In an unlikely twist for a book jacket illustration, Chipp’s dino design was sold to MCA for a pittance; as a salaried employee of Knopf, he had neither rights to it nor say in its usage. It was then integrated into the movie’s logo and signage, both onscreen and off, and became one of the more recognizable logos of the ’90s.
Throughout Book One, Kidd fires potshots at the paperback versions of hardcovers he’s designed. Some, like Jurassic Park, utilize the hardcover design, at least for early runs. But Kidd takes pains to point out those he did not design—the jackets toned down for wider appeal. The English Patient is a good (meaning bad) example of this. The movie tie-in paperback, which I remember well from when it was released during my tenure at an independent bookstore in Cleveland, is based on one of the film’s posters and features an extreme amber-colored closeup of two of the characters locking lips. A cover line announces, “Now a Major Motion Picture From Miramax Films.” (Kidd notes that “Independent booksellers actually complained about it and demanded the original be restored, which it eventually was.”) Of course, the jackets of affordable trade paperbacks target possibly indecisive, “everyday” readers whereas hardcover books and their higher retail generally target “serious” readers willing to pay a premium for a sturdier format that will also look nice on their bookshelves.
Kidd admits early in his book, “I’ve been described as not having any recognizable style and that’s one of the greatest compliments I could hope for.” If he does have a signature look, it may be his self-admitted “fall-back design,” which he’s used on jackets from Cormac McCarthy to David Sedaris: a bisected, often quirky photo taking up a horizontal half of the jacket with simple type placed in the other half. Another signature look may be his “magpie method” of deriving his central image from an odd print or Polaroid, or a purchase from a flea market or antique shop that’s been scanned or photographed expressively, repurposed items that have included cheap toys, cowhide, scrapbook items, cigar boxes, linoleum patterns and type from ranch brands and playbills.
His designs are often “clean,” simple with direct imagery and uncluttered type, recalling the classic Esquire covers of George Lois. In this era of declining subscription sales and ad dollars, plus the presence of wordy cover-wraps and cover-lines, a mass-market magazine couldn’t get away with a Lois design today. But Kidd’s in the enviable position of “design for design’s sake” with his jackets, which are subject to differing market pressures than magazines or paperbacks.
Even his more eclectic jackets—or at least those more gimmicky by design—maintain a solid simplicity. Brett Easton Ellis’ Glamorama (1998), which appears inspired by Paul Rand’s “holey” die-cut jacket for Nicholas Monsarrat’s Leave Canceled (1943), simply lists the title but the white jacket is riddled with tiny die-cut holes through which color headshots of celebrities are visible. (The printer had to send the jackets through the punch-press thrice; fewer passes and chads would have gummed it up to a halt.) I also like the simplicity of Deen Koontz’s Intensity (1996), which features an abstract pileup of concentric triangles in Day-Glo orange and yellow, a pun on the title but a refreshing avoidance of a typical suspense-thriller design.
Here are ten miscellaneous things I learned about Kidd and book jacket design from Book One:
- Chip Kidd is gay.
- Chip Kidd has always hated Matisse.
- Chip Kidd loves Macs.
- Chip Kidd is “a shameless ham” who will “use the slightest excuse to go before the camera.” Whenever his jackets depict a photograph of hands or a head in silhouette, it’s likely Kidd’s.
- John Updike supplies sketches for his book jackets and “is nothing if not thorough” in the design process. Kidd demonstrates this by showing his mock-up of The Afterlife (1994) plastered with twelve Post-it Notes worth of handwritten edits by Updike.
- Chip Kidd designed a Swatch watch, the “Swatch decoder,” which looks like something Dick Tracy would wear.
- Chip Kidd often recasts the Knopf logo, a borzoi (Russian wolfhound), which appears on the book’s spine: it’s been turned into a mutant with five legs, a cartoon, a skeleton and a pit bull, among others.
- Chip Kidd’s first published jacket design was for The Photographer’s Sourcebook of Creative Ideas by John Hedgecoe (1986). It doesn’t hold up well today.
- A rejected design for David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim mimicked that of an actual teach-yourself-Swahili textbook. “If I saw someone carrying it I think I’d feel a little sorry for him,” Sedaris wrote Kidd. “It seemed like a book a person was being forced to read. This was exactly what I’d wanted, but when I saw it realized I understood that it might present a problem.”
- One of my favorite rejected jackets was for Richard Schickel’s biography of Clint Eastwood. It features an extreme color close-up of Eastwood’s squinting face from one of the Dirty Harry films riddled with three die-cut bullet holes. Schickel denounced it as a disrespectful aberration. Kidd counters: “I just liked the idea of some thug firing at the book and having no real effect on it other than just pissing off ‘Dirty Harry’ even more.”