Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is a prominent American author, illustrator, and graphic designer, who has been creating memorable designs for contemporary literature since the mid-1980s. His work has been featured on the covers of some of the most popular titles of the last three decades and is highly celebrated in both the publishing and design industry.

Chip Kidd graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1986 with a major in Visual Arts. Often working with the art department at Knopf, he began creating jackets for many of the publishing house’s books. His wraparound cover art for Douglas Coupland’s book Microserfs was such a success that Coupland declared Kidd the father of ‘hip-geek’ culture. Other noteworthy designs included jackets for Art Speigelman’s Maus and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day.

Asides from illustrating book covers, Kidd has also written two novels. His first, The Cheese Monkeys, follows a young graphic design student as he paves his way through art school and adulthood. A widely acclaimed comic novel, it was also adapted into a play. Pedigree, Kidd’s subsequent book, is a fast-paced thriller about a twisted game of genetic engineering gone wrong.

Kidd has also written, directed and produced several short films throughout his career. One of the most renowned is the collaboration he worked on with Stan Lee – the notorious co-creator of characters such as Spider-man, Iron Man and X-Men. Their joint work, Stan Lee Presents the Differences, premiered in 1995 at the Sundance Film Festival.

Kidd is also an avid comic book collector. He has an impressive library of comics that he is often seen reading, watching and analyzing. His passion for graphic storytelling is obvious in the way he writes his novels, especially with loveable outcasts being at the centre of them. Kidd is often credited for breaking the mold between comic book and literature, allowing for the two formats to come together in a realm of ‘visual writing’.

Chip Kidd’s body of work is vast and renowned, both in the publishing and graphic design industry. His eye for detail and visual creativity has made him a household name in the American literary world, allowing him to break boundaries between art and literature. His two books – The Cheese Monkeys and Pedigree – both offer a captivating glimpse into the human condition, and are a testament to his influential career.