Chip Kidd: Book Two

by Chip Kidd, Haruki Murakami (Contribution by), Neil Gaiman (Contribution by), Orhan Pamuk (Contribution by)

Overview

FOREWORD INDIES Book of the Year Awards — 2017 GOLD Winner for Art

According to the Huffington Post, “Chip Kidd is the Meryl Streep of book design.” At the forefront of a revolution in publishing, Kidd’s iconic covers, in large part inspired by memorabilia and comics, have influenced an entire generation of designers, artists, and the book world.
 
CHIP KIDD: BOOK TWO: WORK 2007-2017 picks up where Book One left off showcasing his impressive body of work from the past decade as well as new works yet to be seen this year. We see not just hundreds of his recent projects, but the working processes behind them—thoughts, sketches, revisions, scrapped drafts, and triumphant final versions. The bestselling authors he has worked with include the likes of Cormac McCarthy, John Updike, David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, Mary Roach, Oliver Sacks, and Elie Wiesel.  He has created movie art for entertainment powerhouses like J.J. Abrams, DC Comics,  Universal Pictures, and Paramount Pictures, and, he is known by geeks worldwide for his comic book and graphic novel work. Alongside striking images of his work are witty essays by Haruki Murakami, Neil Gaiman, and Orhan Pamuk that are sure to delight any bibliophile.
 
Throughout this ten-year retrospective, Kidd leads readers through each step of his design journey culminating in a section on how to write and art-direct a graphic novel, using as an example his New York Times-bestselling Batman: Death by Design.
 
Displaying the master’s passion for unconventional and forward-thinking book covers, film work, and graphic novel projects, this volume is sure to bring fresh inspirations to design aficionados, book lovers, pop-culture fanatics, comics fans, and design students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780847860081
Publisher:	Rizzoli
Publication date:	09/26/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 12.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Chip Kidd is the associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf. His first novel, The Cheese Monkeys, was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is the editor-at-large for Pantheon and the author of Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, Batman Collected, among other books. Haruki Murakami is a contemporary Japanese writer. Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Editorial Reviews

You can almost always judge a book by its cover if it was created by Chip Kidd…whose second monograph cuts an impressive slice of book publishing and design history. Without ever giving a plot away, Kidd's covers and jackets—evocative marriages of typography, color and picture—are, especially for avid book readers, among the most memorable images of the past 30 years…They are witty, mysterious and elegant. He does not allow his style to dominate, but rather creates styles that fit the individual authors like suits of clothes…Book Two is filled with entertaining professional anecdotes about doing projects with the likes of John Updike, Cormac McCarthy and Elie Wiesel, along with a little design philosophy thrown in for good measure…A natural storyteller, Kidd uses graphic design as a language to tell his own stories while helping others to convey theirs.

The New York Times Book Review - Steven Heller

"The result is a richly illustrated keepsake for book lovers and designers."
—Publishers Weekly 

"...vibrant decade long retrospective"
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2017-08-07
More than a decade after the first, the second volume of art and anecdotes from one of the foremost book-jacket designers in contemporary publishing.Those with an extensive library will already have plenty of these works of art on their shelves: the dust covers on novels by Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Jay McInerney, Michael Chabon, and so many others. Yet, collected in their own book, these designs show just how prolific and eclectic Kidd has been. He has also used his publishing experience as a springboard for his own career as a novelist (The Learners, 2008, etc.), with his writing often showing the same inventive flair as his design. The authors with whom he works sense a kindred spirit as well. Murakami praises his "boundlessly inventive ideas, the out-of-the-box perspective, the sly sense of humor, the carefully calculated anachronisms, the occasional glimpse of the lyrical." Neil Gaiman writes, "he broke every rule in publishing…including some that the publishers didn't realize were rules until Chip did it differently." Kidd's art often doesn't submit to the rectangular format of the book jacket or serve as a representational depiction of the subject or author. Instead, his playful creativity seems to reflect something deeper. This collection also shows how his design assignments extend beyond his employment at Knopf, with Rolling Stone and Newsweek commissioning magazine covers and Paul Simon enlisting his services for a CD booklet. Where album covers once drew attention to visual artistry, CDs shrank that art to the point where it became less noticeable, and streaming has all but eliminated any attention to album art at all. Will book design suffer the same fate in the move to e-books? In the self-interview that opens the collection, Kidd addresses changes in publishing and how those might affect his approach to his work. Not at all, he insists, for while publishing is always changing, the hard copy of a book has shown its staying power. As for his own work, it is also constantly changing, as reflected in this vibrant decadelong retrospective, but it has most certainly endured.

Kirkus Reviews