As UnBeige, mediabistro.com’s design blog, did its year-in-review posts Monday, Alissa Walker noted, quite rightly, that 2007 was a good year for Chip Kidd: Not only did he win a National Design Award for all those book jackets over the last two decades, he started doing public readings from his new novel, The Learners—with a backup band.
Of course, The Learners is probably the easiest answer to my headline question; the novel, which began nearly four years ago as a serialized story in USA Today, has already gotten pretty good notices from PW, which has its quibbles but still thinks it’s a “beautifully composed paean to pre-computer graphic design.” But I’m not ruling out the possibility that there’s going to be at least one book jacket from him this year that’s going to knock it out of the park…