“Source of the J.P. Logo”: The Untold Story Behind the Jurassic Park Icon.

The Jurassic Park logo, a black Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton set within a red-orange roundel, is one of the most recognizable images in film. Fewer people know that it did not begin in a Hollywood art department, but as a diagram in a scientific textbook, hand-traced by a young book designer working on a novel that would become a phenomenon.

How the Logo Was Made

In 1990, Chip Kidd, then a twenty-five-year-old designer at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, was asked to create the dust jacket for Michael Crichton’s new novel about resurrected dinosaurs. Kidd wanted an image that felt scientific and authoritative, more museum than movie poster. Searching for a reference, he wandered into the gift shop of the American Museum of Natural History and bought Robert L. Carroll’s Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, a dense academic survey of prehistoric life. Turning its pages, he stopped at page 296 and a stark skeletal diagram of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

What happened next is written, quite literally, on the page. Kidd traced the skeleton by hand and began testing the design in the margins, sketching the bones, drawing an arrow to the skull, and asking himself in a note whether to use just the head “or upper whole body?” He lettered the words “Jurassic Park” and “Michael Crichton” directly beside the diagram, trying out the type that would frame the finished book cover. From those rough marks he refined a clean black silhouette with a Rapidograph pen, the technical drafting pen favored by illustrators, and arrived at the now-famous jacket. It was one of the first major assignments of a career that would make Kidd the most celebrated book-cover designer of his generation.

When Steven Spielberg’s film premiered in 1993, the studio adopted Kidd’s design, unchanged, as the logo for the entire franchise, an almost unheard-of leap from book jacket to global brand. The copy offered here is Kidd’s own working reference, with those original page-296 sketches still in place.

Michael Crichton, Master of the Techno-Thriller

The novel Kidd was designing came from one of the most commercially successful authors who ever lived. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton turned his scientific training into a new kind of fiction, the techno-thriller, that made cutting-edge science both accessible and terrifying. His breakthrough, The Andromeda Strain, appeared in 1969, and over the following decades he produced a long line of number-one bestsellers including The Great Train Robbery, Congo, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, and Timeline. His books have sold more than two hundred million copies worldwide and been translated into some forty languages. In the mid-1990s he achieved a feat no other storyteller has matched, holding the number-one spot in film, television, and book sales at the same time, with Jurassic Park, the hospital drama ER that he created, and the novel Disclosure.

A Global Phenomenon

Jurassic Park did for the movies what Crichton had done for the page. Spielberg’s 1993 film combined the pioneering computer imagery of Industrial Light and Magic with Stan Winston’s full-scale animatronic dinosaurs, and the result was a spectacle unlike anything audiences had seen. It became the highest-grossing film in history to that point, won three Academy Awards, and set a new standard for visual effects that reshaped the industry.

The story did not end there. Crichton wrote a single sequel, The Lost World, in 1995, and Spielberg brought it to the screen in 1997. More films followed, and in 2015 the series was reborn with Jurassic World, which alone grossed more than 1.6 billion dollars. Across its films the franchise has earned well over six billion dollars worldwide, to say nothing of the theme-park rides, video games, and merchandise, making it one of the most successful franchises in cinema history.

The technical achievement behind the first film was so significant that it became a subject in its own right, documented from the storyboards and scale models to Stan Winston’s workshop and the digital artists of Industrial Light and Magic. Through every sequel and revival, one element has stayed constant: the skeleton Chip Kidd traced from page 296.

Each of the books featured above is available to view and purchase at Raptis Rare Books on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and online at RaptisRareBooks.com. Watch the full story here.

Browse our current inventory of Michael Crichton first editions and a wide selection of books with dust jackets designed by Chip Kidd.

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