"Providing tactical strategies and creative support 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, this book speaks to students, educators, and seasoned professionals. Part personal memoir and part professional manual by Matt Owens, A Visible Distance, Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design is a reality check to challenges when building a practice in graphic design or branding. These lessons and learnings span the recent decades: from his 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." -- Publisher's website

• From technology to commodity
• Deep design in a shallow world
• Thoughts on creative inspiration
• Design's secret weapon : creative empathy
• Creative surface as business substance
• Building informed client-designer relationships
• Designing creative purpose
• Perception vs. reality of creative practice
• Leading from the middle : collaboration and creative leadership
• Breaking bad client habits
• Designing for love and money
• Failure by design
• Design is everything, but everything is not design
• What are your design maxims?
• Optimizing your performance as a designer
• Less design leadership, more design authorship
• What it means to be a full-stack designer
• My love letter to Adobe Flash
• Designing for the modern web
• The rise of the ghost firm
• Tools, not rules
• Student design portfolio tip sheet
• Prompting ain't easy
• Future forward: a new agency hypothesis