Talent Is Not Enough: Business Secrets For Designers

The best business guide for design professionals just got better! This revised and expanded second edition includes everything designers need—besides talent—to turn their artistic success into business success. You’ll find information on key issues facing designers from freelancing to managing established design firms. A strong visual focus and to-the-point text take the fear factor out of learning about thorny business realities like staffing, marketing, bookkeeping, intellectual property, and more. These smart business practices are essential to success in graphic, Web, and industrial design. Here are just a few of the things you’ll learn:

• How to get on the right career path

• The best way to determine pricing

• How to avoid common legal pitfalls

• How to manage large projects

• The secrets of efficient design teams

• How to forecast your workload and finances

Talent Is Not Enough provides a big-picture context for these and other challenges and shares practical, real-world advice. Since its first publication, the book has become an essential resource for both students and working professionals in these areas and more:

• Design planning and strategy

• Corporate identity development

• Publication and editorial design

• Brand identity and packaging design

• Advertising and promotion design

• Marketing communications

• Environmental design

• Industrial design

• Motion graphics

• Interaction design

• Information design

“It is rare to find one individual with such a wide range of knowledge in the design-related fields. And, because of his experience as a designer, Shel brings a sensitivity and understanding to administrative issues while still respecting the artistic side of our industry.”

Frank Maddocks, President, Maddocks & Company

“Now that design skills have become a commodity, you need business skills to focus them. Shel has written a crackerjack book that will be on the shelf of every ambitious designer.”

Marty Neumeier, author of Zag and The Brand Gap

The best business guide for design professionals just got better! This revised and expanded second edition includes everything designers need—besides talent—to turn their artistic success into business success. You’ll find information on key issues facing designers from freelancing to managing established design firms. A strong visual focus and to-the-point text take the fear factor out of learning about thorny business realities like staffing, marketing, bookkeeping, intellectual property, and more. These smart business practices are essential to success in graphic, Web, and industrial design. Here are just a few of the things you’ll learn:

• How to get on the right career path

• The best way to determine pricing

• How to avoid common legal pitfalls

• How to manage large projects

• The secrets of efficient design teams

• How to forecast your workload and finances

Talent Is Not Enough provides a big-picture context for these and other challenges and shares practical, real-world advice. Since its first publication, the book has become an essential resource for both students and working professionals in these areas and more:

• Design planning and strategy

• Corporate identity development

• Publication and editorial design

• Brand identity and packaging design

• Advertising and promotion design

• Marketing communications

• Environmental design

• Industrial design

• Motion graphics

• Interaction design

• Information design

“It is rare to find one individual with such a wide range of knowledge in the design-related fields. And, because of his experience as a designer, Shel brings a sensitivity and understanding to administrative issues while still respecting the artistic side of our industry.”

Frank Maddocks, President, Maddocks & Company

“Now that design skills have become a commodity, you need business skills to focus them. Shel has written a crackerjack book that will be on the shelf of every ambitious designer.”

Marty Neumeier, author of Zag and The Brand Gap

The author is a graphic designer, management consultant, and educator with more than twenty years of experience in managing the operations of leading design firms in the U.S. and the U.K. He currently provides management consulting services to a range of creative firms in both traditional and new media, and he serves as chairman of the AIGA Center for Practice Management. Shel has written the Professional Practice column for STEP magazine, the Design Business newsletter for AIGA, and the Design Firm Management column for Graphics.com. He has given presentations and workshops for many organizations, including IDSA, SEGD, HOW, ACD, Dynamic Graphics, STEP, Seybold, APDF, PromaxBDA, InSource, RGD Ontario, and the Graphic Artists Guild.

He teaches courses in professional practices at the California College of the Arts, the Academy of Art in San Francisco, and the University of California. He has served on the national boards of AIGA and the Association of Professional Design Firms. He has also been honored as an AIGA Fellow “in recognition of significant personal and professional contributions to raising the standards of excellence within the design community.”