Preserving The Soul of The Graphic Designer
To a designer it may be sacreligeous, but the first lesson learned from Adrian Shaughnessy's new book "How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul" is to never judge a book by its cover. While the outside design reminds me of those wide-ruled little blue test-taking notebooks used by colleges and universities, the inside pages are filled with helpful tips, logical insight, and amusing stories.
"How to be a graphic designer without losing your soul", published by Princeton Architectural Press and designed by Bibliotheque, addresses many concerns of young designers who, according to the book, "want to earn a living by doing expressive and meaningful work, and who want to avoid becoming hired drones working on soulless projects."
While this might sound like a hackneyed promise delivered by another self-righteous self-promoting design preacher, I can tell you the book comes across as anything but empty design gospel. In fact, Shaughnessy offers anecdotal evidence throughout the book to make the point that there are other ways to do things.
Besides his refeshingly modest yet confident writing style, Shaughnessy, who was the co-founder and creative director for the London design firm Intro until 2003 and who now writes regularly for Eye, Design Week, and Creative Review, also provides interviews with 10 established designers (Rudy VanderLans, John Warwicker, Neville Brody, Andy Cruz, Natalie Hunter, Angela Lorenz, Alexander Gelman, Kim Hiorthoy, Peter Stemmler, and Corey Holmes), delivering much more than his own perspective on critical issues such as:
- Attributes needed by the modern designer
- How to find a job
- Being freelance
- Setting up a studio
- Running a studio
- Winning new work
- Clients
- Self-promotion
- The creative process
Oh yeah. Did I also mention the foreward is penned by Stefan Sagmeister, who admits to "having misplaced little pieces of" his soul?
Shaughnessy assumes nothing is common sense and even offers detailed advice on coverletter layout, letterhead design (which he says must be done by you, the designer, not by someone else for you), and proper portfolio presentation gestures.
But more important, by covering all the bases and leaving no room for excuses (in only 160 pages), he forces designers to be honest about themselves. Do they really have the passion, personality, motivation, talent, discipline, self awareness, and integrity to succeed at graphic design without losing their soul?
secular cultures and the Biblically sound? people seem depressed because there is only imperfection. nothing is ever as good as u want it to be and no one really knows how the world began and how it will end because all the scientists in the world have a billion theories but nothing real because all they do is say "im right the Bible is wrong"