Milton Glaser, the designer best known for creating the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo, offers ten pieces of advice from a life in design:
- You can only work for people that you like: “all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client”.
- If you have a choice, never have a job: “if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age”.
- Some people are toxic; avoid them.
- Professionalism is not enough, or: the good is the enemy of great: “Professionalism does not allow for [continuous transgression] because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success”.
- Less is not necessarily more: “Just enough is more”.
- Style is not to be trusted: “anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist”.
- How you live changes your brain: “The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on, [than a computer]”.
- Doubt is better than certainty: “Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience”.
- On aging: nothing matters.
- Tell the truth.
via Green Oasis