- Publisher
- Laurence King
- Published
- 2010
- Shelf
- design: Practice
- ISBN
- 9781856697095
Practice
How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul
Adrian Shaughnessy
A working designer's account of the half of the job nobody teaches: pricing, clients, contracts, and how to stay interested.
Why read it
Shaughnessy's argument is that a design career is mostly not designing (it is negotiating, writing proposals, and choosing what to refuse), and that the people who last treat that half as craft too. The pages on how to price work and how to run a first client meeting are still the most honest written on either.
Why own it
It is the book you re-read at every change of scale: first job, first invoice, first hire. The chapters are organised by career stage rather than by topic, so a reader in trouble finds the relevant twenty pages in seconds. That is what a reference does and what a podcast cannot.
Who it is for
Anyone about to go freelance, and any designer whose work is good and whose business is not.
Reading order
Book 5 of 6 in the graphic design reading order. See all 6
Read nextDesigning DesignKenya HaraEnd with Kenya Hara of Muji, whose essays on emptiness and on designing for touch and smell ask what design is for.Read before thisA Smile in the Mind
Opens a search on AbeBooks, a network of independent and antiquarian sellers, which is where a good part of this shelf has to be found, because it is out of print.
Read next
Chosen because they argue with this one, not because a machine noticed they share a category.
Also on the·design shelf