The Art of Business: Designs on Writing about Design

Eric J. Adams

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I’m always of two minds when new books are released for design professionals. The first is: Right on! that publishers still publish books for this market, considering the competition from the all-consuming Web and how few business people actually take the time to read professional books anymore. When a good book hits the market, it reminds me how wonderfully tactile, informative, and satisfying the experience of reading about a profession can be.

On the other hand, I cringe at the prospect of finding the same old information warmed up in a new way, or another diatribe about the artist’s life and his/her immutable influence on all things worthy.

Four new books from Allworth Press drive home both these reactions to varying degrees. Allworth publishes a strong list of books for designers, photographers, writers, performing artists, and even arts and craft designers.

Good Guide
Two of the four new books focus on the business of design: “The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Pricing, Estimating & Budgeting,” by Theo Stephan Williams, founder of Real Art Design Group, Inc.; and “Digital Design Business Practices: For Graphic Designers and Their Clients,” by Liane Sebastian of MichaeLight Communications.

“The Graphic Designer’s Guide” hits the mark for those starting out or a few years into a business. Williams walks readers through key considerations, such as determining hourly rates, value pricing, new media pricing, fatal errors, pricing options, estimating do’s and don’ts, and troubleshooting estimates and proposals. Sidebars offer bullet-point checklists and other pertinent information. And the writing style is straightforward; Williams speaks with an easy authority that comes from many years in the business.

The book’s appendix is worth the price of the Guide alone, particularly for designers just getting started. It includes an estimating worksheet, estimate/confirmation assignment form; project mission statement, weekly time sheet, project expense ledger; change order form, and a form for the all-important invoice.

If you’re a real pro looking for Excel formulas and intricate equations, you won’t find them here, just practical advice and a few soft numbers for staying in the ballpark and staying in business.

Got Webification?
There’s a trend among book publishers to make books appear more Web-like and less like, well, books. I’m not sure why. If a reader wants Web content they’ll go to the Web.

Such is the case with “Digital Design Business Practices.” The book is chock full of valuable information, but its dizzying design — endless bulleted lists, italics, bolds, margin notes, varying point sizes, vertical rules, and shadow pull-quotes — make it a difficult read, even as a reference guide. To top it off, the text throughout is presented in sans serif, not exactly an enticement to sit for a few hours (or a few minutes) by the fire, virtual or real.

The book gleans much of its information from about 400 writers and a dozen magazines and conference sources. Consequently, at times it sounds more like a busload of conventioneers on their way to a Seybold Seminar than a single author with a single voice.

“Digital Design” does succeed in delivering a lot of valuable, just-the-facts information, and it covers the gamut of business and workflow challenges. But its hurried feel and visual bombardment made me breathless, almost panicky, like I was constantly missing something vitally important or my career would take a nosedive if I didn’t read one more bullet point. Maybe this is the future of books, I hope not. I’ll take the serenity of a linear experience any day.

The Reflective Life
For some reason, artists and writers love to reflect on their lives and work. Sometimes these meanderings genuinely add to the dialogue about the meaning of art and its relation to society, other times they don’t. It’s a hard target to hit, largely because art and its societal significance are so subjective; what resonates with one reader garners a yawn from the next.

Two new books take a stab at this illusive subject: “Design Issues: How Graphic Design Informs Society,” edited by DK Holland; and “The Graphic Design Reader,” by Steven Heller.

“Design Issues” is co-published with Communication Arts, the crème de la crème of design magazines, and draws from material published in the magazine’s popular Design Issues column. DK Holland was for many years director at the famed Pushpin Group in New York, and here her task is to build a framework for the material originally written by about 20 prominent designers. It’s no easy chore; the original column covered a wide variety of topics from the price of fame to “postindustrial postliteracy.”

Holland succeeds by organizing the material around five key arenas: branding, critical design, ethics, creativity, and inspiration. The structure works in breathing fresh life into such essays as: “The Designer as Executor, Agent, and Provocateur” (William Drenttel); “Is Functionalism Functional?” (Justin Vood Good and Peter Good); “A Few Reasons We’re all Doing Worse Work” (Sean Kernan); and “Where Ideas Come From” (David Lance Goines).

If one essay doesn’t grab you, the next one will, and since each essay stands on its own, the book can be eaten in bites with the satisfaction of a full meal. Holland never loses sight of the pragmatic needs of designers and throws in a few welcome incursions into the esoteric.

A Rambling History
Steven Heller’s “The Graphic Design Reader” is at the same time more brilliant and more frustrating than DK Holland’s book. The Reader is comprised of 50 Heller essays, most personal critiques of design trends and milestones, from the swastika to Pokemon. The mission of the book is “to redfine the designer’s role in understanding and influencing pop culture.” It succeeds here and there with true gems of observation, but fails to create a unified whole around its subject matter.

For example, there’s a fascinating essay entitled “Hate Thy Enemy” that details the role and methods of designers in creating government propaganda campaigns, particularly in wartime. The piece is accompanied by vivid stereotypical images of Koreans, Jews and Japanese, and seem particularly timely in today’s political environment. But other essays, on subjects like teen magazines and the calendar girls of colonial Hong Kong, seem rambling. Not that these subjects aren’t worthy of assessment, but Heller fails to draw valuable lessons for designers, make connections to other essays, or articulate greater truths.

I once ate books like this for lunch, loving every nuanced observation. And if you’re a fan of academic and historical esoterica, feast away. But if you’re late on a deadline, and you have three clients waiting for callbacks, and the @#%&*#$ prepress shop is late again, sit this one out until you have plenty of time for reflection.

Meanwhile, thank all the book publishers who continue to publish for and about designers, because it will be a sad day when there’s not a fresh title on bookstore shelves.