A Not-So-Serious Book Review: “How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul” by Adrian Shaughnessy

Let me start by saying what you probably are wondering about the most: No, the book doesn’t give an answer to the question given in the title. Or maybe it does. It all depends on how you interpret the title. If you interpret the title to be: “How to be a graphic designer without selling your soul to the devil for doing work that is against your principles”, then no, no answers here, sir. But if you interpret the title to be: “How to be a graphic designer without losing your head trying to figure out how to be a designer in practice”, then yes, you will have answers. (The author himself writes that the book originally was going to be called “How To Be A Designer Without Losing Your Shirt”. The decision to change “shirt” with “soul” in the title makes it misleading.)

This book is about how to function as a graphic designer: How to find a job, how to work freelance, how to set up a studio, how to run a studio, how to win new work, how to work with clients, how to self-promote yourself and how to do the creative process (there’s basically the whole index for you). And it’s a great book one those subjects; lot’s of handy tips for the new designer as well as the established. And there is actually a sentence here and there about not selling your soul to do a design job, but they are limited and the book still doesn’t provide any answers, like almost all texts on the subject of design vs. soul. I find them to be all about words; telling you how you should use our design skills for the benefit of the community and other fine statements like that, but no one is saying HOW that is achieved. At least I’m yet to find a text that does. But I’ve got some promising books coming in from Amazon over the next couple of weeks, so I’ll be back with some reviews on those.