Start Me Up

It’s nev­er too late to get start­ed, is it?

I reread this book from the Artist’s Mar­ket Busi­ness Series hop­ing to prime my mind with mar­ket­ing ideas and reminders of tech­niques for get­ting myself out there. While there’s some real val­ue to what’s con­tained in this book, Noth­ing real­ly grabbed me to take on as an action item, with the excep­tion of join­ing an asso­ci­a­tion like AIGA or the Graph­ic Artists Guild to get in to events and net­work and trade ideas with oth­er peo­ple doing the same thing. Or at least hear some lectures.

One prob­lem this book runs into is that illus­tra­tion and design have been chang­ing so rapid­ly that much of it is sim­ply out of date. Much is time­less, but some of the advice about the kinds of jobs avail­able from, for exam­ple, news­pa­pers, is sad­ly out of date. Avail­able tech­nol­o­gy has changed the illus­tra­tion and design mar­kets so pro­found­ly that a book writ­ten sev­en­teen years ago is bound to have some mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion. In 1990 com­put­ers were becom­ing a big deal in the graph­ic arts, but trade mag­a­zines were still sell­ing ads for X‑acto blades and mark­ers. I’m sure real pas­te­up has dis­ap­peared and I doubt that very many peo­ple sub­mit mark­er comps like they had me do in col­lege (to pre­pare me for what I’d have to do at an agency).

The next quib­ble I have is with the book’s orga­ni­za­tion. It’s well-divid­ed into top­i­cal chap­ters, but each chap­ter has one or more pro­files of artists with their expe­ri­ences rel­e­vant to the chap­ter. These are inter­est­ing and use­ful, but are each between one and three pages long, frag­ment­ing the chap­ters and even fin­ish­ing sen­tences pages after their start. What’s more, these pro­files, which are essen­tial­ly full-page side­bars, often have notes describ­ing or relat­ing anec­dotes relat­ed to sam­ples of the artist’s work. The side­bars have side­bars! This makes it dif­fi­cult to main­tain the flow of ideas.

Each chap­ter also fin­ish­es with a page of check­list items, basi­cal­ly recap­ping the points made in the chap­ter. I’ve seen that put to good use in oth­er books, but here it seemed flat and use­less. Per­haps some ques­tions or sug­ges­tions for bring­ing the ideas into prac­tice would have been more helpful.

I believe that there is a new­er edi­tion of this book out. If you’re at all inter­est­ed in read­ing it, do make sure you get the new­er edition.