The book cover: It's the first thing you see when you pick the book up and the last thing you see when you close it. Whether or not you judge its contents by its outer appearance, the cover plays a part in your journey with the text, from spying it on a shelf to reaching the final page. Few know this journey as well as Chip Kidd, the celebrated book cover designer who will speak about his iconic covers and creative process at UCSB's Campbell Hall on Tuesday, May 9, in a UCSB Arts & Lectures event.
From Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park to Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kidd has designed the covers and sleeves for thousands of books, taking on the role of visual author of the readers’ experience. At his talk, Kidd hopes to guide the audience through his creative process step by step, in all of its second drafts and rejections. With “most cases of the books I was assigned … it got rejected, and I'll share what I did to what to hopefully solve it. And, frankly, sometimes I solve it, and sometimes I don’t,” he said.
Currently the associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House, Kidd generates an average of 75 covers a year, both at Knopf and as a freelancer for Amazon, Doubleday, Grove Press, HarperCollins, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Scribner, Columbia University Press, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. When asked if he had a favorite design he's done, he said, “Oh god, I've been doing this for 34 years for over 1,500 books. I can't remember.” Designing the covers for his own books, he said, was the hardest.