Chip Kidd has probably been in your bedroom — and on your bookshelf, and under your holiday tree. As one of Knopf’s top art directors, he has designed nearly 2,000 book covers that have helped propel the works of authors such as Michael Crichton and David Sedaris to the top of the bestseller list. As USA Today famously put it, Kidd is the “closest thing to a rock star” there is in graphic design. Kidd also has written two novels, The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners, as well as several books on Batman. His latest effort — Bat-Manga! — surveys 1960s Japanese memorabilia featuring the Caped Crusader. Kidd lives in New York City and Stonington, Conn.
STIR: What colors were important in your childhood?
CK: Red was my favorite color. In sixth grade, I got permission from my parents to paint one wall of my bedroom red. That was considered very strange in Reading, Pa., in the 1960s. To this day, I will default to red, white and black when I can’t think of anything else. That combination speaks to a certain kind of classicism. When I got to art school, I saw the Russian constructivists hewed closely to that palette.
Color use is intuitive.
The colors used on the “Batman” TV show resonated with me early on: saturated, very intense. At that point, there were still shows in black and white. And then there’s the simple but ingenious use of color in The Wizard of Oz.
STIR: How do you approach color in your work?
CK: It’s hard to talk about color apart from other elements of design. It’s just one tool I work with. Color use is intuitive. Why is the Coca-Cola logo red even though the soda isn’t? But it works really well.
STIR: You once called Batman “a brilliant design solution.” What did you mean?
CK: Let me geek out here and go back to Batman’s origins, according to the “Batman: Year One” series. The Gotham police force is hugely corrupt. Bruce Wayne wants to fight crime, but doesn’t want to become a cop. He’d rather operate outside the system. Dressing as a bat is a tactical thing — the whole concept is to scare people before you even engage with them. It’s a fascinating idea: the good guy who looks like a villain. I think of the cover as the face of the book. If the cover is successful, it’s the beginning of the story.
STIR: You’re known for the economy with which you communicate a complicated idea. How has color played a part in that?
CK: Well, now we’re back to that red, white and black scheme. There was a novel by Michael Crichton called Disclosure, the book he wrote after Jurassic Park. It had to look completely different, since the subject is sexual harassment and not dinosaurs. I didn’t want it to look at all pornographic. I went very abstract, but red was the dominant color. The next book I’m doing is about vintage Batman items from Japan, Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan. There’s an interesting issue of color in that book: In the 1960s, the Japanese did a lot of Batman comics, but they couldn’t print full color. They used monotone and duotone, which starts to look like Japanese block printing. It’s very elegant.
STIR: Batman plays with people’s expectations — a little like what your book covers do.
CK: The next book I’m doing is about vintage Batman items from Japan, Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan. There’s an interesting issue of color in that book: In the 1960s, the Japanese did a lot of Batman comics, but they couldn’t print full color. They used monotone and duotone, which starts to look like Japanese block printing. It’s very elegant.
STIR: What’s the weirdest inspiration you’ve had for a book jacket?
CK: The cover for The Abomination, a novel that involves the sexual abuse of a young boy. This photographer’s calling card landed in my mailbox: a picture of an upside-down stuffed rabbit. There was no direct connotation of pedophilia, but there was a similar sensibility between the photo and Paul Golding’s story. That’s largely a colorless jacket, just shades of taupe and white and black. The photographer is Lars Klove, who mostly does still life.
STIR: If you could design anything, without budget limitations, what would you choose?
CK: A house. I was just in Grand Rapids, Mich., as part of my book tour, and visited the single best restored Frank Lloyd Wright residence in the country, the May House, built in 1908. Every single detail was thought through by a brilliant sensibility. The design was incredibly radical for its time. It’d be extremely satisfying to think through an entire house.
STIR: What colors do you surround yourself with at home?
CK: I choose to live with white walls — the one similarity to my graphic design sense. Let’s say I’m working with a photograph that’s in color, maybe even bright colors. That will be the color “star” of the design, and the rest of the type will be white and black. My apartment follows the same concept. The walls are white; it’s the objects — primarily toys I collect — that are in color.
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