Noted Book Jacket Designer and Writer Chip Kidd to Serve as College of Arts and Architecture Commencement Speaker
May 10, 2007
Penn State alumnus Chip Kidd, who has been designing book jackets for publishing house Alfred A. Knopf for 20 years, will be the spring 2007 commencement speaker for the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture. The commencement ceremony will take place at noon on Saturday, May 19, in Eisenhower Auditorium.
Kidd, who was named a Penn State Alumni Fellow in 2004 and received a College of Arts and Architecture Alumni Award in 1996, has led the evolution of the book jacket from protective cover to influential artistic statement. A 1986 graduate with a B.A. in graphic design, he has designed book jackets for work by authors such as Michael Crichton, John Updike, David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. This year he designed three of the five Pulitzer Prize-winning books: The Road by Cormac McCarthy; The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright; and David Lindsay-Abaire's play Rabbit Hole.
Kidd’s designs were recently featured in the Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Triennial 2006, and he will be receiving this year's National Design Award for Communications, the highest honor in the field of graphic design.
Also a writer, his comic novel The Cheese Monkeys, based on his days as a graphic design student at Penn State, was published in 2001 and became a national bestseller. He has also written a seven-part novella about a young graphic designer, titled The Learners, which was part of USATODAY.com’s Open Book Series. In addition to his fiction-writing, Kidd has authored, designed and/or edited several non-fiction books on the art of comics in America, written for many leading design magazines, and been featured in hundreds of articles in mainstream, trade and online publications. He is a regular contributor to the Op-Ed Page of The New York Times, and since 1995 has been the design consultant for The Yale Review.
His work is highlighted in two recent books, Chip Kidd: Book One, a combination retrospective and memoir of his 20 years in publishing, published in 2005 by Rizzoli, and the 2003 monograph Chip Kidd, by Veronique Vienne (Yale University Press). Kidd is a native of Reading, Pa.
Contact: Joyce Hoffman, jhoffman@psu.edu or 814.863.2104