Kidd is currently the associate art director at Knopf, an imprint of Random House. He first joined the Knopf design team in 1986, when he was hired as a junior assistant. Turning out jacket designs at an average of 75 covers a year, Kidd has freelanced for Amazon, Doubleday, Farrar Straus & Giroux, Grove Press, HarperCollins, Penguin/Putnam, Scribner and Columbia University Press, in addition to his work for Knopf. Kidd also supervised graphic novels at Pantheon, and in 2003 he collaborated with Art Spiegelman on a biography of cartoonist Jack Cole, "Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits". His output includes cover concepts for books by Mark Beyer, Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Dean Koontz, Cormac McCarthy, Frank Miller, Michael Ondaatje, Alex Ross, Charles Schulz, Osamu Tezuka, Gengoroh Tagame, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, John Updike and many others. His most notable book cover design was for Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park" novel, which was so successful that it carried over into marketing for the film adaptation. Oliver Sacks and other authors have contract clauses stating that Kidd design their book covers. Kidd’s influence on the book-jacket has been amply noted—"Time Out New York" has said that “the history of book design can be split into two eras: before graphic designer Chip Kidd and after.”