Chapters

Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. ~Vince Lombardi Nobody likes to stay late at the office. Ideally, you’ll work at a place that respects work-life balance. But as an important milestone nears its deadline, or your team is striving for…

If there’s one thing you learn by working on a lot of different Web sites, it’s that almost any design idea-no matter how appallingly bad-can be made usable in the right circumstances, with enough effort. ~Steve Krug I’ve often used the following reductionist metaphor with designers I’ve hired and managed to explain why code is…

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. ~Theodore Roosevelt You bring your car into a mechanic because something isn’t working right. The mechanic pokes around a bit and believes they can help you. But first they need to ask: “Is this alternator a Remy, and do you have…

Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think. ~Steve Jobs   You can hear the usual pushback against this idea immediately: “But I’m a designer . . .”  It doesn’t matter. Learn some code. “I want to focus purely on my discipline!” It doesn’t matter. Learn some code. “I…

I don’t know a single person who has achieved success without doing a solid percentage of things for free as a jockeying chess move to their success. ~Gary Vee   Visiting a friend one summer, I learned of an awesome tech product that his father was building. He discovered I was a designer and asked…

Value is not determined by those who set the price. Value is determined by those who choose to pay it. ~Simon Sinek   There is a lot of discussion around price points for designers, both for hourly wages and flat fees for projects, but you should approach it simply. Want some guidance? Charge as much…

People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic. ~Seth Godin   To bemoan the cheap and quick design output that is available online is a critical error in how to think of your own value. It’s all too easy to point to this cheap offshoring as the reason you can’t…

It is no secret that the real world in which the designer functions is not the world of art, but the world of buying and selling. ~Paul Rand In the previous chapter, I did my best to describe just how wonderful design can be. However, a critically important factor to remember is that design is…

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated. ~Paul Rand Design is amazing. Can you imagine being paid for your creativity? To a designer, it’s exciting to be brought interesting challenges by clients, then being asked to come up with solutions. It’s also flattering to…

My career goal was to become an animator or illustrator, but in the early days of college I didn’t have the talent or drive to pull it off. I was accepted into art college at the age of seventeen but failed to get into any other artistic courses after my initial one. It was a…