A Visible Distance

A practical guide to building your own design and branding firm, as told by a leading figure in the field

Part personal memoir and part professional manual by designer and creative strategist Matt Owens, A Visible Distance addresses the common challenges faced when building a practice in graphic design or branding. The book provides concrete strategies to tackle the complexities of balancing intuition and taste, technical and personal capability, strategic business decisions in design work and the demands of modern brand building. The book spans the last several decades: from Owens’ roots in DIY, punk and skateboarding in the later ’80s, to the advent of the commercialization of the internet in the late 1990s, building and growing a creative agency, to the present disruption of artificial intelligence, automation and distributed hybrid teams. A Visible Distance is a testimony to learning new things and embracing fundamental changes in popular culture, tools, technologies and processes to make your own way in design.
Matt Owens was born and raised in Texas. He is the founder of multiple design studios and creative agencies including One9ine and Athletics, where he has worked with clients including Sony, Nike, Madlib, Cooper Hewitt, IBM, Google and others. He is currently based in Brooklyn.