What are your design maxims?

A few things I have learned along the way about design and business that have stood the test of time.

My design career — if I can call it that — has now spanned multiple decades. The first thing I created that I would consider a proper design was a seven-inch record for a friend’s band sometime in the ’90s. By the early 2000s, I was designing websites. By the end of the 2000s, I was building brands. In the 2010’s I was growing a business and learning about the power of strategy and process. As we enter the 2020’s, I’m leveraging my learnings of the last few decades to grow more as a person, explore new things, and to find the adjacent possibilities that a career in design has afforded me — like writing this article.

The maxims below are by no means universal truths but they are some of the most important things I have learned. I hope they might help you on your creative journey.

Typography is everything

The value of good typography within the discipline of graphic design cannot be understated. Type can make or break everything else and knowing how to wield typography effectively can separate good work from great work. When it comes to typography, designers need to be good at two things: typeface selection and typeface usage within a design itself. Good typeface selection requires that you know what good typefaces are and where to find them.

A contemporary graphic designer must care deeply about type and, like a record collector, must have good taste and know the nuances and interrelatedness between the subject matter being designed and a typeface and type system that is most applicable and expressive for the purpose at hand. Great contemporary type foundries such as Pangram Pangram, Blaze, Displaay, General Type Studio, Florian Karsten, Edition.studio are just a handful of small type foundries that do not get enough credit for the craft required to develop typefaces that allow a great design solution to be brought to life by a capable graphic designer. Without great type designers we do not have great graphic designers.

There are timeless typefaces (Garamond, Helvetica), trendy typefaces (remember when Brown was all the rage?) and everything in between. And what is…