5 Books That Have Shaped My Career as an Illustrator
A Surprisingly Unrelated-to-Illustration Selection
Confession: The title of this post could almost be “The 5 books I’ve ever read”. I buy more books than I read. And I don’t buy that many books. Most of the books I own look great on my shelf, but I’ve barely made it past the preface. There are very few books I’ve made it all the way through. Most of them, especially nonfiction books, I’ll get to about the halfway point, and then feel like I’ve got it. Everything else is just reiterating the author’s main point. So I put the book on my shelf, a trophy more of effort than of total conquest. However, they do serve a purpose: as a designer and illustrator, it is important to have at least some books in the home. At least I look like I read.
It’s a bit ironic, then, that I’m writing a book that I expect others to read (or that I’m writing a book at all, for that matter). I really do hope people value my words enough to read from cover to cover. Now that I’m styling myself as a writer, I suddenly feel a bit guilty for not reading to the end of all those books. Or, maybe I don’t. Maybe those books deserve to not be read all the way through. And if people don’t read all the way through mine, I deserve it. It’s a challenge for me to write a book that is both valuable and interesting enough to read through completely.
But today I come to write not about my book, but about some books that have truly made a difference in my life and career. Honestly, it was hard to come up with this list, because of how few books I’ve read. I started wondering if I’ve even read 5 books specifically around design, creativity and illustration. After digging way back into my memory, thankfully, I think I found a few treasures.
01 Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (Betty Edwards)
This is by far the most influential on me as an artist. It’s not exactly the kind of book you would sit down and read cover to cover, but you could (and I almost did). Part manifesto and part how-to, author Betty Edwards describes how drawing is not a special skill for creative elites but as natural and accessible as writing. Her main premise is that for people who feel they can’t draw, only a subtle mind shift is necessary. Rather than trying to draw what we know, we must train ourselves to draw what we see. If we can train ourselves to shift into the right way of seeing (which she calls R-mode), we can overcome both our inner critic and the improper way of seeing that prevents us from drawing well. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain appeared in my life right at the beginning, when I started considering a career in the arts. In my early 20s, I was on track to a career in tech, and drawing had until then become something of my past. When I started embracing drawing again, my friend’s mom noticed and gave me her copy. Suddenly I was drawing all the time, and really experiencing this mode shift and really seeing a transformation in my drawing ability. If it wasn’t for this book, I don’t know if I would have truly understood the true purpose and joy of drawing: it’s more about seeing than depicting, more meditation than technical skill. Whether you’re a seasoned artist or you’ve never held a pencil in your life, this book is certain to change how you see and do drawing forever.
02 The Design of Everyday Things (Don Norman)
As I started digging deeper into the world of creativity, I became obsessed with design, particularly graphic design, industrial design, and architecture. Even though I was in the tech field, it seemed that everyone around me was rooting for me to make that career shift. Even one of my supervisors, who in some ways tried to discourage me from making a shift from tech to design, lent me a little book that only fed my fantasy of becoming a designer even more. This book was called The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. Here, Norman’s premise is that usability is just as important as aesthetics. If a design looks good but is somehow complicated, or hard to use, or easy to break, it’s not a good design. He uses the example of a door that opens with push when it appears to need a pull. What (or who) is the dumb one: you, or the door? The answer is the door (or maybe the designer of the door). A designer should create cues that make it easier, not harder, to use their designs. The book elaborates on this basic premise with more examples and insights into how bad design pervades our society, and how through better design, we could improve our experience of using everyday things. This book blew my mind! It opened me up to what design is really about—helping people use things better—and it opened my eyes to see design in every aspect of life. I started seeing everything as design; it gave me a sharper, more objective eye for good and bad design — that it’s often less about taste and more about utility. The book also made me feel way less dumb, since I had truly always thought that when I tried pushing on a door when I should have pulled it, it wasn’t the door’s fault.
One thing you might wonder about this book is how it relates to my illustration career. I think the influence is indirectly through design. This book fed my curiosity, and its ideas travelled with me through art school, where I studied Interdisciplinary Design (which included both communication and industrial design), and into my career as a designer and art director. Since then, I have always seen function as the heart of every creative problem. Before you know what you want to make, you need to know why you need to make it, what it needs to do. Then, you need to know how to design it to do that thing well. Illustration is no exception, even if its function is often less practical. Sometimes an illustration’s function is to give a sense of mystique, to obscure some meaning rather than clarify it. But even in such cases, knowing the function helps me know more objectively when my work is working. It gives me a means of knowing when an artwork is done. As objective and taste-driven as illustration can be, there can always be a sense that its purpose has been fulfilled.
03 Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art (Paul Rand)
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Paul Rand, one of the twentieth century’s most influential graphic designers. One of my earliest encounters with Rand was during art school, when I read his essay, Logos, Flags and Escutcheons. Just read this opening to the essay and try not to be an instant fan:
“It reminds me of the Georgia chain gang,” quipped the IBM executive, when he first eyed the striped logo. When the Westinghouse insignia (1960) was first seen, it was greeted similarly with such gibes as “this looks like a pawnbroker’s sign.” How many exemplary works have gone down the drain, because of such pedestrian fault-finding? Bad design is frequently the consequence of mindless dabbling, and the difficulty is not confined merely to the design of logos. This lack of understanding pervades all visual design.”
I remember reading these words and feeling instant comradeship with this confident and curmudgeon writer. Even though I was only in art school, I had by now perceived the adversarial relationship designers often have with their clients. It’s not that we should ever feel like our clients are our enemies (they never are), but when our ideas face the wrong kind of criticism, when our good ideas die for fear or lack of imagination, it can be hard to feel good about the process. I know a lot of creatives over-respond to client concerns. It’s not that such concerns don’t matter, but creatives sometimes give up too soon on their own ideas. Lacking the persuasion power to back their solutions, they hand the reigns over to their clients, who should never have to bear such a burden. If there is one figure in my life who has emboldened me to stand behind my work and help clients through problem solving rather than fear, it’s Rand. While the aforementioned essay doesn’t appear in Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art, this book contains even more gems, all speaking to issues that every designer (including image designers a.k.a. illustrators) must consider in their career. What sets this book apart from any other is Rand’s ability to speak directly and succinctly to both artistic and professional challenges. His short essays are paired with examples of his own work. You can see that there is nothing he does that he hasn’t thought completely about, and you can also see how consistently (and successfully) he applies his principles throughout his work.
Many of the essays in A Designer’s Art date back almost 75 years, yet all remain completely relevant in 2021. Like many of his designs and commercial art, his writings have survived huge changes in culture and technology. If you’re looking for inspiration to go beyond trends and think deeper about the meaning and making of your art, I highly recommend adding this book to library today.
04 The Paradox of Choice (Barry Schwartz)
This book has less to do with art and design in the direct sense. But one challenge designers and illustrators are plagued with is that of choice. In never. Seems. To. End. Thousands of digital brushes, tens of thousands of available fonts. Tens of millions of colours. 25 variations of logo sketches. 16 rounds of client feedback and revisions. It could just be me, but I’m not a fan of choice. How often have I stood in a grocery store aisle, reading the packages of competing products, trying to make the best possible decision based on perceived value? In The Paradox of Choice:Why More is Less, author Barry Schwartz explains how, when faced with a plethora of options, the quality of our life actually goes down. At least in Western society, we uphold endless choice as one of the crowning achievements of our culture. But, Schwartz argues, the more options we have to choose from, the less happy we will be with our decision. That’s because whatever joy we might experience from the good thing we chose will be diminished by the regret we feel by denying all other things. Reading this book was one of the most affirming things in my career. It came just at the right moment for me too. I was the design director at a small ad agency, where the usual design process involved dozens, sometimes hundreds of versions and variations, often quite minute. We would then present as many as 10 (sometimes more) concepts to our clients. Clients would nitpick or waffle on their decisions. The process would seem to go on forever. By the time we had client approval, I would sense that we were happier to just be done than we were with the actual work. All along the way, I felt that we were showing too much of our process, that we were not doing our job as the creative lead in the client-designer relationship. Our job was to be decisive and to recommend just our best 2 or 3 options (which turns out about the maximum Schwartz recommends). Our clients need a little bit of agency, the sense that they are truly involved in shaping our work. We are well intentioned but go too far to show we are being collaborative.
Client approval is just one side of the choice issue for me. The other side is simply having to make so many decisions in my work every day. The Paradox of Choice shows me that I am not crazy or even a bad person for my disdain of options. And, just as The Design of Everyday Things showed me that it is often a flaw in the design, not in my intelligence in using objects in my life, The Paradox of Choice shows me that too much choice can actually cause harm, both to me and to my clients. Because of this book, I now see it as my job to be decisive, and to shoulder the burden of creative decision-making rather than outsourcing it to my clients.
05 The War of Art (Stephen Pressfield)
This book came much more recently in my life, perhaps no more than 3 years ago. And it wasn’t a day too soon. Turns out the War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles is a classic, a go-to read for anyone who creates for a living. The premise of this book is that there is a force that prevents us from getting our work done, from actually sitting down to make whatever it is we feel we need to make. Author Stephen Pressfield gives a name to this force: Resistance. Resistance is his personification of our own inner road blocks: self doubt, procrastination, laziness, fear, and the like. What I like about The War of Art is that it reads as a devotional. It’s just a simple book with no pictures: just a series of short essays, divided into 3 “books”: Resistance, Combatting Resistance, and Beyond Resistance. You can literally open the book anywhere, read a page or two, and come away with more motivation and inspiration for the day ahead. One of my favourite concepts from the book is Pressfield’s definition of what it means to be a Professional: We show up every day. We show up no matter what. We stay on the job all day. We are committed over the long haul … (the list goes on). He places this idea of being a Professional against its opposite, being a hack. The takeaway: being a professional is all about showing up, “butt in chair” as writer Anne Lamott would say.
The war of art was written from a writer’s perspective, but it applies to almost any creative profession. It’s a must read for anyone who wants to survive a creative career beyond a few years.
