100 Habits of Successful Graphic Designers
blogI have been disturbed to discover that being virtuous has made me a less nice person. You would have thought that cutting out things that are “bad” would help you to become good, but if anything it has done the opposite: I am snappier, think nastier thoughts, and am less helpful. Maybe this explains why puritans have such a bad reputation.
Nevertheless, despite making increased efforts to be kind, I find myself being impelled to write about just how bad 100 Habits of Successful Graphic Designers really is. It is a hateful book that has filled me hatred. It is dull, stupid, aesthetically incompetent, inaccurate, fawning, inauthentic, redundant, wanky, vile, cliched, bourgeois, and incredibly unhelpful.
I quite liked Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. It had some neat ideas, like the four quadrants and the idea of imagining your funeral in order to understand what your priorities are in life. It was also full of practical advice for dealing intelligently with the stuff in your life.
This book, which has over 14 times more habits, has none of that. It is neither practical nor does it have any interesting ideas. Written with the most vainglorious personality-free prose I’ve ever read by something called Plazm, 100 Habits is basically a series of interviews with designers that is watered down into vague imperatives like ‘Acknowledge the value of the analog process’ and ‘When you retire, deal with the possibilities, not the necessities.’ Ugh. These aren’t habits!
Of the designers interviewed, I quite enjoyed Stefan Sagmeister’s obdurate playfulness (he gave up working for a year in order to experiment and sleep with two women at the same time) and Why Not Associates’ excellent work, but the rest aren’t so much successful as merely fashionable. Unfortuately, theres is a fashion that has past and thus most of the work contained looks terribly dated despite the book being only 4 years old.
A more interesting project might have been to track the minutiae of how a successful designer actually work, as Creative Review magazine did last year. This method, as well as addressing essential processes, also provides oblique insights into people’s lives that helps ground designwork in the everyday. By comparison, 100 Habits is a piece of PR fluff. Avoid.