Beautiful Covers: An Interview With Chip Kidd | Smashing Magazine

Q: How did you get into the business of jacket 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.

Q: How did your persona in the design world emerge?

Kidd: The thing about book covers, I think probably in most parts of the world, is that the designer gets credit on the jacket for what they’ve done. For most graphic designers, that’s not the case, in terms of how it works in print or TV commercials; you don’t see who made something on the piece itself. But in graphic design, you do. What was getting out there was the work itself. Over time that built up, to the point where people started to recognize my name.

Q: What other forms of art you enjoy? I’ve spotted elements of popular art in your work. Do you identify with what was going on in New York City in the ’50s and ’60s?

Kidd: I’m definitely affected by it. But I have very strong opinions about it, in that I think somebody like Roy Liechtenstein basically is a fraud who got everybody to buy into what he was doing. And paintings about comics became far more important to critics than the comics themselves. I’m much more interested in the comics themselves. I couldn’t give a shit about a decontextualized panel that was stylized by this person. But everybody bought into it, amazingly.

Similarly, do I think Warhol was a great artist? Yes. But should he have given half the money to the guy who actually designed the canvases or the Brillo box or any of that other stuff that he totally appropriated? It’s based on something that somebody else made — that person should get credit, too. And they didn’t. I’m very much against that. It’s an abuse of the original designer.