February 6, 2004 03:02 PM

The Art of Chip Kidd

Not so long ago, the Great Zeldman recommended this Chip Kidd monograph on his personal site. I'm always ready to take up recommendations, and Amazon makes it terrifyingly easy to do this, so today (with barely 10 days since placing my order - amazing to a resident of the Southern Hemisphere), it arrived. I've done a couple of book covers myself in recent times, with varying degrees of (dis)satisfaction at the results, and am aware of the very particular artistry required to make them work. Good book cover design is a beautiful thing.

I've really only skimmed the book so far, but there's really very little that's familiar to me, despite Kidd's relative fame. This is probably because Australian versions of overseas books are frequently published in Australian-designed jackets. Leaving aside the curious regional specificity that this habit lends to what is otherwise an international art, it does make it interesting to compare versions - Kidd's design for Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, for example, uses the same photo as my locally-produced copy, but the type design is different. Weird.

Comments

I have a lot of respect for the work that Chip Kidd has done in the past, but I feel that he’s over-exposed in a lot of ways — and often undeservedly — especially with respect to how often he shows up in quotes in the mainstream medium, i.e., outside of design publications. What irks me the most is the way that he’s become the go-to-designer when it comes to serious comment on comics and comic art. There’s something not very convincing about his enthusiasm for comics, at least to me. Anyway, this is not to take away from the quality of that monograph… I just felt a need to qualify his accolades.

Posted by: Khoi Vinh

Yes, I think that a “lasting obsession” with Batman does not a comicbook scholar make… I always equate comics with some kind of subversive / subcultural thing, and Kidd’s work doesn’t have that vibe. Nevertheless, a lot of his work is quite wonderful. But a monograph of graphic art is a funny thing, since the relationship between this kind of work and the market is so strong that some stuff just seems painfully unfashionable. And book cover design is so hit and miss anyway.

Posted by: Virginia