Speaker Introduction – Chip Kidd
In my opinion Chip Kidd is one of the people who understand what design is really about. And I am genuinely thrilled to announce that he is coming to beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2026.
What makes this even more special for me is that Chip was with us back in 2015 in Berlin, and that talk left a real impression. The wit, the warmth, the depth of thinking behind what can so easily be dismissed as “just book covers”.
A Man Who Changed How We See Books
If you’ve ever picked up a novel and thought, wow, that cover is something else, there is a reasonable chance Chip had something to do with it.
Since joining Alfred A. Knopf straight out of Penn State in 1986, Chip Kidd has designed covers for some of the most significant books of the last four decades. We’re talking Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Donna Tartt, David Sedaris, Neil Gaiman. And yes, that T-rex skeleton you know from Jurassic Park. The one that became one of the most recognised icons of the 1990s, carried into the film and the entire franchise – that’s Chip’s work too.
Time Out New York once wrote that “the history of book design can be split into two eras: before graphic designer Chip Kidd and after”. That says it all, doesn’t it?
He’s currently vice president and art director at Knopf, and editor-at-large for graphic novels at Pantheon. He has designed well over 2000 covers across his career, which meansaround 75 a year! Chip has won five Eisner Awards, the 2014 AIGA Medal, and the 2007 American National Design Award and his TED Talk on book design has been viewed nearly three million times!
More Than Covers
What I love about Chip is that he refuses to let his work be reduced to its surface. Yes, the covers are iconic, but he’s also a novelist, an editor, an author of design books, a passionate advocate for comics and graphic storytelling, and genuinely one of the funniest people you’ll encounter at an event.
He doesn’t have a signature look – deliberately so. His philosophy is that every book deserves to be seen and understood on its own terms. The cover is a conversation with the content, not a brand stamp applied from the outside.
The Batman Obsession
There is another side to Chip that is just as important to understand, I think: he is, by his own admission, a total “Batmaniac”.
It started with the 1966 Batman TV show – his “gateway drug”, as he puts it – and never really stopped. He became one of the world’s leading experts on the character, authored Batman: Death by Design, helped bring the rare Japanese Bat-Manga! to Western audiences, and has contributed extensively to the Batman comics universe.
But the project that perhaps shows both his passion and his generosity best is Batman Black and White. When DC Comics commissioned him in 2013 to write a story for their Batman: Black and White anthology, the issue came with a blank variant cover. Chip saw an opportunity. He started inviting some of the most extraordinary illustrators, cartoonists, and artists in the world to each draw their own version of Batman on one of those covers. No brief, no rules, just Batman in black and white. The results were breathtaking. Contributors ranged from Eisner Award winners and New Yorker cartoonists to Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. I don’t know how many covers exist of it, but when showing me videos of it, I was absolutely impressed and would get that easily 150 covers eventually came together into an exhibition that travelled across the US, with proceeds going to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, as far as I know.
Why You Need to Be There
Whether you work with books or not, Chip’s perspective on communication, storytelling, and visual problem-solving will resonate. He talks about design the way designers wish they could: honestly, with humour, and without pretension.
Having him back in the beyond tellerrand family after Berlin 2015 is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while. If you meet him in Düsseldorf, I think you will feel the same way ;)
Oh, and if you take the chance to speak to him, really ask him about his “Batman Black and White” project.