You Are Not an Artist: A Candid Guide to the Business of Being a Designer

It's becoming increasingly easier for anyone to be a "designer," or at least call themselves any combination of designerly-titles: Graphic designer, art director, commercial artist, visual communicator, content creator... The list goes on.

But there's one big thing about design that most people get wrong: It's not about making things look good. A designer's job is to focus on meaning, how it can be created and communicated. To understand how products are sold and marketed. To evaluate business problems and solve them with creative ideas and processes. Like the list of titles, this too goes on and on.

Sadly, the majority of design education has poorly positioned the role of the designer. Too few practitioners develop the necessary understanding that design is a business, not an art. Good news: All the things designers aren't being taught in the classroom can be found in this book. Things like: What makes design successful, rather than good. How to amass a body of knowledge, rather than a body of work. And why the design community should strive to be an army of thinkers, rather than makers.

Whether you're a student, you're five years into an agency job and still floundering to find confidence, ten years in and considering career reinvention, or feeling stale and burnt out from decades of poor collaboration and deadline fatigue, this can act as a companion throughout your journey. Plus, it's also for the design curious and the design adjacent, because the little details that make designers successful is knowledge that everyone can benefit from, as design touches all aspects of our everyday life.

Jon Robinson is not an artist. He's the Head of Design and Research at Pager, a virtual navigation platform supporting healthcare consumers. Before that, he did a bunch of other stuff: Freelanced, agency gigs, not-for-profits and in-house design teams, and built experiences for global brands as a tech consultant. Jon has a bachelor's degree in art history and graphic design from Illinois Wesleyan University, a graduate degree in creative technologies from Illinois State University, and a graduate degree in design thinking from Indiana University. He misplaced 2 out of 3 of those diplomas.

At heart, he's a polymath. In spirit, he's someone who would never actually use the word "polymath." He's lectured and spoken on everything from user experience to the convenience economy, from service design to his passion for anything published by Kurt Vonnegut. In addition to his general love for learning, Jon taught design for nearly a decade, most recently with the School of Art, Design, and Media at Lindenwood University and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. He co-authored 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know from O'Reilly Media. Jon lives with his wife and two children in Missouri.