PA Spotlight: Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd, a renowned designer came from a small town not far from me, Shillington in Pennsylvania. He now practices his design from the big apple of New York City and Connecticut where his work thrives, boasts and wows. He is probably more known for his work on book jacket design and most recently entered the music industry with a group known as artbreak.

Chip Kidd’s career could have ended at one pivotal moment in his life. A class assignment at Penn State was to design a book jacket for John Updike, where the teacher in turn suggested that book design would not be a good career choice for him. Thankfully this did not stop Kidd and he moved on to designing nearly 75 book jackets a year at Random House for Knopf. In 2001 he himself added author to his resume by releasing The Cheese Monkeys, a novel based on his experiences through college and the demands of sadistic art instructors. Recently in 2008, he released The Learners, a sequel to his first authored success.

Nowadays Chip is associate art director at Knopf where he continues to astound the design community with his book jackets and novel work. And in his spare time ( or what’s left of it ) he is an avid comic book geek, which I mean in an endearing way not a school bully way. He has made being a comic book fan cool taking it to the next level by working with Saul Ferris in developing Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan. How many comic book collectors can say that?

Chip Kidd never fails to mention where he comes from and that makes my admiration for him grow each time I hear or read an interview or re-read his story. Even though this town does not speak very much of him, I try to let other know that great people have come from this area and Chip Kidd will always be on that list.