I’ve been working for many months on a new book, and it’s just about ready. It’s called “How They Got There: Interviews With Digital Designers About Their Careers.” You can sign up to be notified as soon as it’s ready at this web site—if you do you’ll even get an early bird discount on the purchase price. Here’s the cover.
Hopefully, the title of the book gives you a good idea what it’s about, but to elaborate a little: it features fourteen interviews that I conducted with designers of prominence—many of the names will be familiar to readers of this blog, while others are up and comers or have built fantastic careers outside of the main spotlight. I talked to studio designers, agency designers, startup designers, designer entrepreneurs—I worked hard to get a diversity of folks who have done meaningful work “online” in recent history. Here’s the full list:
- Dan Cederholm of Dribbble
- Alex Cornell of Firespotter Labs
- Nicholas Felton of Daytum
- Agnieszka Gasparska of Kiss Me I’m Polish
- Cemre Güngör of Branch
- Erika Hall of Mule
- Naz Hamid of Weightshift
- Karen McGrane of Bond Art + Science
- Wilson Miner of The Factory
- Jill Nussbaum of The Barbarian Group
- Evan Sharp of Pinterest
- Geoff Teehan of Teehan + Lax
- Justin Van Slembrouck of Digg
- Marcos Weskamp of Flipboard
You can read terrific profiles of many of these folks elsewhere, but the conversations that I conducted with them are both narrower and more in-depth. They focus squarely on how these folks discovered their callings in the design profession, how they got their first big breaks, how they put together successful careers in digital media. There are some wonderful, insightful, brilliant, hilarious and amazing stories captured here.
Basically, this is the book that I wish that I could have had handy when I was just starting out, when I was trying to figure out how to get from A to B career-wise. Even better, what I found when I was writing it was that the conversations were so interesting that I felt newly inspired myself. I think you’ll feel similarly.
I’m putting the finishing touches on it now and it should be ready within a few weeks. The book is self-published and will be digital only, at least for now. So go sign up for the list and be among the first to read “How They Got There” when it comes out—at a discount, too. I’ll be writing more about it here on this blog soon, too!
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