Success By Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers

by David Sherwin

Overview

Want to make your design business a success? Start here.

Fellow Designer,

In your career you may have been like me: Trying to keep projects on the rails and clients happy. Digging through blogs for useful advice. Wondering if there was a better way to handle all of the demands of being a design professional and running a creative business.

The wisdom contained in Success By Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers will help you become a stronger businessperson and better plan your career path as a design leader. This book was born from in-depth interviews with a slew of successful designers, studio directors, project managers, and client service professionals across a wide range of creative industries.

It contains the business secrets I needed the most when I started as a designer sixteen years ago.

--David

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440329791
Publisher:	Adams Media
Publication date:	11/06/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	382,633
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

David Sherwin is an interaction designer and creative director with a depth of expertise in developing compelling solutions for challenging business problems. His first book was Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills (HOW Books).

David is currently a Principal Designer at frog, a global innovation firm, where he helps to guide the research, strategy and design of novel products and services for some of today's leading companies and nonprofit organizations. He is also a senior lecturer in the BFA in Interaction Design program at California College of the Arts. He has spoken and conducted workshops at events such as SxSW, Interaction 11, HOW Design Live, as well as at several design schools. His writing has appeared in TheAtlantic.com/Life, A List Apart, PSFK.com, HOW and many other periodicals.

He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, the poet and writer Mary Paynter Sherwin. In his free time, he maintains the blog ChangeOrder at www.changeorderblog.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Working with Customers 5

Client Service 7

Business Development 15

Proposals 29

Contracts 41

Spec Work 46

Politics 49

Negotiation 55

Discounts 61

Expectations 63

Design Briefs 69

Deliverables 76

Meetings 77

Presentations 79

Feedback 83

Networking 87

Competition 88

Strategy 89

Managing your Projects 99

Project Management 101

Process 109

Estimating 115

Budgets 131

Schedules 137

Risk 142

Stakeholders 145

Change Orders 150

Time Sheets 152

Proofreading 153

Errors 159

Postmortems 165

Operating Your Studio 173

Money 175

Hourly Rates 189

Insurance 196

Sustainability 197

Legal 202

Confidentiality 205

Culture 211

Leadership 221

Accounting 229

Hiring 247

Freelance 251

Vacation 255

Bringing it Together 257

Resources, About the Author & Permissions 285

Index 290