Judging Book Covers
The field of book-cover design is hardly overrun with celebrity graphic artists and iconic illustrators. I only know of one — the wildly innovative, widely admired, and weirdly controversial graphic designer Chip Kidd.
Once I learned about Kidd’s ubiquity in the world of book-cover design, I began to see his own work and examples of his influence on almost every bookstore and library shelf. I was first formally introduced to his designs by Veronique Vienne’s fascinating critical study, Chip Kidd: Monographics, which features a lengthy essay on Kidd’s life and career along with dozens of examples of his work.
Kidd has described his primary design influences as a combination of 1960s television images, cartoons, and comic books. The bold graphics and bright colors of the era’s toy packaging, particularly Batman memorabilia, are credited by Kidd as some of his earliest and most valuable lessons in layout and design.
Vienne’s book thoughtfully evaluates Kidd’s iconic book covers, and its photo captions connect the often abstract themes of Kidd’s work with the actual content of the books whose visual first impressions he created.
One of my favorite examples, both as a novel and a cover design, is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. Kidd explains that he attempted to “combine classical and modern sensibilities” on the cover just as Tartt’s characters tragically attempt in the book:
Kidd insists one of his cardinal rules of book-cover design is “never be literal.” Although it violates this maxim, his design for Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, along with the other two volumes of the Border Trilogy, has become one of Kidd’s best-known works:
Some of Kidd’s comic book influences can be seen in his series of designs for writers like Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, for whom Kidd’s lurid covers have become a kind of visual trademark:
Kidd has also tried his hand at writing autobiographical fiction in 2001’s The Cheese Monkeys and last year’s sequel The Learners. The novels are satires of academic life that draw on Kidd’s experiences in a large state college design school staffed by discouraging, unhelpful professors, and as one would expect their own covers are striking examples of Kidd’s design aesthetic:
