The Art of Business: The Good, the Bad, and the Redundant in Graphic Design Business Books
This may be the age of the Internet, but that isn’t stopping publishers from delivering new printed business books for graphic designers. The latest is How to Grow as a Graphic Designer by Catharine Fishel, author of Paper Graphics, Redesigning Identity, The Perfect Package, and other titles. Fishel is also a writer for PRINT, ID, Graphis, and Communications Arts magazines.
How to Grow as a Graphic Designer is a compendium of interviews with successful graphic artists on a range of mostly personal growth topics, such as defining yourself, keeping clients, monitoring your progress, and handling pro bono work. As the title implies, the book focuses less on the nuts and bolts of the business of graphic design and more on personal issues that graphic designers face.
In the piece on defining success, for example, Laura Rigsby of Rigsby Design suggests, “It’s not about doing things right, but finding the right things to do.” And in a section on finding time to think, Terry Marks of Terry Marks Design advises that you “give yourself a place of stillness. If you are running hard all the time, all you get is run down.”
For better or worse, the book is decidedly more touchy feely than Fishel’s previous effort, Inside the Business of Graphic Design: 60 Leaders Share Their Secrets of Success. This book is also a collection of interviews with designers from prominent design companies in the United States and abroad.
In this previous Fishel title, topics range from dealing with staff to the role of partners to how and when to work on spec (basically never).
These two titles complement each other and make for nice bedside reading. You’ll have to decide whether the informal interview/profile approach works for you. It’s certainly illuminating to see what other successful designers think, but the format makes it hard to find specific answers to specific problems.
Clients Galore
For more concrete advice, I suggest The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Clients: How to Make Clients Happy and Do Great Work by Ellen Shapiro. Shapiro’s illustrious career includes 25 years as head of Shapiro Design Associates and teaching stints at the School of Art+Design, Purchase College in New York, and Parsons School of Design.
Because the book focuses on clients and clients only, Shapiro has the breathing room to provide the nitty-gritty details of her topic — and she does in sections devoted to clients in the corporate, retail, entertainment, and institutional markets. Shapiro employs the same interview/profile approach as Fishel, although here the information is more tactical than ethereal.
Meat and Potatoes
When it comes to selling yourself, writing proposals, networking, positioning your firm, and drawing up contracts, I can recommend four books.
The first is Selling Graphic Design by Don Sparkman. It’s a bit outdated (published in 1999), but in 200 pages, Sparkman covers a lot of territory, such as zeroing in on the right clients, closing deals, and printing trade customs and practices. A no-nonsense writing style makes everything Sparkman writes seem important, and it is; he leaves out the sizzle and serves up the steak.
Another worthwhile perennial is The Graphic Designer’s Guide to Pricing, Estimating & Budgeting by Theo Stephan Williams, founder of Real Art Design Group. This book 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 Williams’ writing style is as straight forward as Sparkman’s.
The Guide’s appendix is worth the price of the book alone, particularly for new designers. 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 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.
Several years ago, I gave a tepid review to a book called Digital Design Business Practices For Graphic Designers and Their Clients by Liane Sebastian.
I was wrong. This is a very good book, and it has served me as a valuable resource since it landed on my desk. My criticism had to do with the book’s dizzying design — endless bulleted lists, italics, bolds, margin notes, varying point sizes, vertical rules, and shadow pull-quotes, which makes it difficult to read, even as a reference guide. But the breath and depth of the information contained within makes the slog worthwhile.
Digital Design is divided into four sections: planning, development, production, and completion. Any one of these sections would be a worthy book. All four together make for a great title. I don’t even notice the busy page design anymore.
The king of all business books is The Graphic Arts Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines. The Graphic Arts Guild Handbook guidebook was first published in 1973 as a 24-page booklet. Now it is a 332-page guide (slimmed down from last edition’s 464 pages) packed with practical advice, trade customs, pricing surveys, business forms, and glossaries.
There’s just something about multiple editions that make a book both deep and brisk all at once. And the fact that the newest edition is shorter helps. You get the same experience with a good piece of software that’s been through a number of
revisions, and you see it in this handbook as well. Updated or expanded areas include revised model contracts; pricing surveys for both buyers and sellers; and digital media and web design.
The book is divided into 15 major sections, including chapters covering project planning, proposal development, budgeting, legal, intellectual property and contractual issues, working with artists’ representatives, billing procedures, credit, and more. It’s all covered in depth and organized in a clear and concise format, with step-by-step information and resources.
Graphic Design Titles
I’m often asked about titles that explore the art of graphic design rather than the business. Here’s a list of books that seem to rise above the rest. (While I didn’t know Molly Joss was going to make design books the topic of her most recent column, our lists dovetail nicely.)
The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type by Alexander W. White. A complete design course for beginners and a worthy refresher for pros. Covers the principles of great page design, typography, and other elements of design.
The Big Book of New Design Ideas by David E. Carter. A catalog of examples for designers of all sorts.
Graphic Design Cookbook: Mix & Match Recipes for Faster, Better Layouts by Leonard Koren, R. Wippo Meckler. Contains more than a thousand line drawings, design devices, type treatments, spatial solutions, and pictorial presentations.
Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students by Ellen Lupton. Covers the fundamental design challenges of working with letters, text, and grids in text-heavy publications.
Powerful Page Design: Top Designers Lay Out Their Concepts to Reveal Their Inspirations by Gail Deibler Finke and Clare Warmke. A collection of the most innovative layout work happening today, along with in-depth commentary on each project from the designers themselves.
Designers in Handcuffs: How to Create Great Graphics When Time, Materials, and Money Are Tight by Pat Knapp. Instructions on how to design and produce publications when faced with the very real challenges of time and budget.
Visual Literacy: A Conceptual Approach to Graphic Problem Solving by Judith Wilde and Richard Wilde. A hands-on course in creative thinking with nineteen design challenges and more than one thousand responses executed by the authors’ students.
Read on!
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on April 25, 2005
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