From School Library Journal
Adult/High School--Graphic-design students, book lovers, marketing and sales majors, and browsers alike will be drawn to this well-designed, beautifully illustrated examination of Kidd's oeuvre. A glance at the examples, from a scrapbooklike tribute to Charles Schulz to the dinosaur silhouette for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, reveals the wide-ranging and influential nature of the designer and illustrator's work. He is known most widely for his design of book covers, for example the three progressively colored jackets for Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" or the typographical logo that Elmore Leonard carries with him from publisher to publisher. Kidd's innovative use of photographs and graphic-design elements to reinforce the concept of reality in fiction added a new dimension to book covers. Vienne begins with a candid and useful history of her subject's development, especially his obsession with Batman and other comic heroes. While the author places him firmly as a member of the team at Knopf with a publisher willing to take some significant chances, she allows him his just deserts as an innovator. There are 105 color reproductions, almost all described stylistically in the text, with wry comments and insights from Kidd in the captions. A fine introduction to an artist and art form visible everywhere, but not always given its due.--Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA
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From Booklist
There's a portrait of Chip Kidd in Marion Ettlinger's
Author Photo, presumably as author of the novel
The Cheese Monkeys (2001), but Kidd is also a gifted and enormously successful graphic designer specializing in book jackets for such distinguished houses as Knopf. Vienne chronicles Kidd's unique use of photographic images, fascination with comic strips, involvement with graphic novels, and reputation as a jester. Readers are then free to marvel over Kidd's visual acumen and agile wit as manifest in jackets for books by Peter Carey, Donna Tartt, Robert Hughes, James Ellroy, Michael Ondaatje--well, you get the point.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
