Was reading through this book i ordered a couple months back. I was thinking, why didn’t i have this last year when I was still hammering it out in my ex company? It covers just about everything we should have known at that time. Business practices for designers, processes, invoicing, project management, professional integrity, morals, etc.
It’s the perfect book to complement fresh graduate design student. I’ve mentioned this in the past, now the book mentions it as well. Most design schools do a good job of nurturing talent, teaching technical skills, and guiding portfolio development. That’s all good, but they don’t teach professional practices. This results in many graduates like myself, hitting the streets each year with well rounded portfolios and a lots of enthusiasm, but absolutely no idea how to determine pricing, negotiate fair contracts or avoid getting into sticky situations with the law and clients.
It even mentions the mistakes most start-ups will make, which indeed happened to us. Many new design firms go out of business after a few years not because anything’s wrong with the quality of work, but because of inadequate business practices. Professional practice insights are not often shared between competitive firms, and small companies often can’t afford the services of outside business advisers.
Because of this, creative firms tend to re-invent the wheel when it comes to daily business practices. Not only is this trial-and-error approach incredibly frustrating and unnecessary, on a larger scale it sort of holds the entire profession back. The design industry in Singapore i would say is a small one, and every bad interaction with designers and agencies will have an impact on the overall impression the general public has on us creative people.
Everything you want to do, any career path that you want to take, someone out there has most probably already gone through it, made a ton of mistakes, became successful and have written about it somewhere in the form of websites or books. No need to waste your time and effort re-inventing. Just do some research and you’ll find all your answers.
