Additional Information on Chip Kidd:
Chip Kidd during his 2012 TED Talk on The Hilarious Art of Book Design
Highlights of Smashing Magazine's Interview with Chip Kidd:
How Did you get into book design?
Chip Kidd: It happened to be the first job that I was offered. I studied graphic design in Pennsylvania, where I grew up, but I knew that when I graduated I would go to New York. So, I did. I just went to every graphic design place that would see me, but eventually ended up at Random House. And it was an entry-level job, as assistant to the art director. Well, it wasn’t really what I had in mind, but I tried it for a while. It gave me a start, and it’s 24 years in October.
Did it take a long time?
Kidd: It seemed long at the time, but it probably took two or three years, which in retrospect isn’t that long at all.
Do you see the cover as part of the book?
Kidd: It is a part of the book. It’s literally your first impression — it’s the book’s face. Regardless of what kind of book it is, this is the way you’re going to visually preserve it first before you open it. But this doesn’t have much to do with someone buying it. People tell me they buy books for their covers. But it’s not a sales tool in the sense of you’re going to buy it because you like that cover. Really, what the cover should do is get you to open the book and start to read it and investigate it. And at that point, the book is going to sell itself to you, or not.
I very much try to downplay the jacket as a sales tool, because I think that publishers invest too much intellectually in this concept, and they can actually make my work much, much harder than it needs to be. And certainly with the advent of buying books on the Web, you’re not going to buy a book from Amazon because of the way it looks. It’s just not the nature of how that works. The problem arises when you get a bunch of people in a room looking at a jacket and determining the fate of the design based on preconceptions of how the book will sell, about how this design will help the book to sell.