Feeling uninspired? If you’re a creative professional-or just someone who’d like to be more creative in your work and daily life-look no further than Designers Don’t Have Influences. Creative director, writer, advocate, and design cheerleader Austin Howe’s elegant, incisive, and amusing essays are sure to appeal to a wide spectrum of readers. Howe chronicles the lives, philosophies, and work processes of leaders in disparate fields from art to spirituality and even ice hockey, man...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist**, an even more forward-thinking and necessary book on how to take that critical next step on a creative journey—becoming known.**Show Your Work! is about why generosity trumps genius. It’s about getting findable, about using the network instead of wasting time “networking.” It’s not self-promotion, it’s self-discovery—let...

**The book that Inc. says "every entrepreneur should read" and an FT Book of the Month selection...How did the movie The Shawshank Redemption fail at the box office but go on to gross more than $100 million as a cult classic?**How did The 48 Laws of Power miss the bestseller lists for more than a decade and still sell more than a million copies?How is Iron Maiden still filling stadiums worldwide without radio or TV...

This is the definitive guide to writing engagingly about the art of our time. Invaluable for students, arts professionals and other writers, it brims with practical tips that range across the full spectrum of art-writing including academic essays; press releases and news articles; texts for auction and exhibition catalogues, gallery guides and wall labels; op-ed journalism and exhibition reviews and writing for websites and blogs. Gilda Williams, a London correspondent for Artforum, points...

The frank and compelling story of an extraordinary woman and her adventures in fashion, business, and life.“Most fairy tales end with the girl marrying the prince. That's where mine began,” says Diane Von Furstenberg. Von Furstenberg lived the American Dream before she was thirty, building a multimillion-dollar fashion empire while raising two children and living life in the fast lane. Her wrap dress, a cultural phenomenon in the seventies, hangs in the Smithsonian...

An inspiring look at the hidden stars in every field who perform essential work without recognitionIn a culture where so many strive for praise and glory, what kind of person finds the greatest reward in anonymous work? Expanding from his acclaimed Atlantic article, "What Do Fact-Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have in Common?" David Zweig explores what we can all learn from a modest group he calls "Invisibles." Their careers require expertise, skill, and dedication...

**From Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Paul Goldberger, a full-fledged critical biography of Frank Gehry, undoubtedly the most famous architect of our time.“Fascinating. . . . An informative, startling journey into the inner sanctums of modern architecture’s power structure.” —The New York Times Book Review“Riveting. . . . Full of little-known facts about the Pritzker Prize-winner that will surprise the most knowledgable Gehry-philes.” —Architectural Digest*...

In this day and age, when art has become more of a commodity and art school graduates are convinced that they can only make a living from their work by attaining gallery representation, it is more important than ever to show the reality of how a professional, contemporary artist sustains a creative practice over time.The 40 essays collected here in Living and Sustaining a Creative Life are written in the artists’ own voices and take the form of narratives, statements and i...

What do Howard Hughes and 50 Cent have in common, and what do they tell us about Americans and our desires? Why did Sean Connery stop wearing a toupee, and what does this tell us about American customers for any product? What one thing did the Beatles, Malcolm Gladwell and Nike all notice about Americans that helped them win us over? Which uniquely American traits may explain the plights of Krispy Kreme, Ford, and GM, and the risks faced by Starbuck's? Why, after every other plea failed, d...

A monograph, manual and manifesto by one of the world's leading graphic designers. Protégé of design legend Massimo Vignelli and partner in the New York office of the international design firm Pentagram, Michael Bierut has had one of the most varied careers of any living graphic designer. The 35 projects Bierut presents in this book illustrate the breadth of activity that graphic design encompasses today, his goal being to demonstrate not a single ideology, but the enthusiastically eclecti...

Welcome to Culturematic: How Reality TV, John Cheever, a Pie Lab, Julia Child, Fantasy Football, Burning Man, the Ford Fiesta Movement, Rube Goldberg, NFL Films, Wordle, Two and a Half Men, a 10,000-Year Symphony, and ROFLCom Memes Will Help You Create and Execute Breakthrough IdeasA Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine.Once wound up and released, the Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemp...

Renowned designer, author, critic, co-chair of SVA’s MFA program in design and National Design Award recipient Steven Heller reaches into the most contemplative recesses of his mind to offer an entertaining new collection of ruminations on the nature and future of design. In Design Cult-the first of a series of three titles published exclusively as e-books through the DesignFile consortium-Heller expounds on such disparate topics as Milton Glaser, Japanese masks, ...