Saturday, December 10, 2011

You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover


The Independent surveys the current state of book jacket design.

From the piece...

CHIP KIDD

Regarded by many in the industry as the king of the designers, Chip Kidd has spent the past 25 years creating the visual identity for some of America's best writers: Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Cormac McCarthy. He has just designed the US jacket for Haruki Murakami's celebrated IQ84.

"It's a deliberately complicated design," he says, "and not just on the jacket, but across the opening pages, and even in the numbers of the pages themselves. The aim here was to celebrate the book as an object."

Many consider that Kidd has elevated the process into an artform.

He smiles. "Well, that's debatable. Jacket design is ultimately a piece of art serving a more important piece of art: the writing itself."

If most authors crave a Kidd design, not all of them are immediately easy to please. "I did about five jackets for Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child," he says. "He didn't care for the first four."

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