One of the world's most successful design firms reveals its inner workings in this look at the business of being creative. Written by the owner of a 25-year-old company that at times has both thrived and barely survived, each chapter addresses a different challenge in running a design firm, such as how to bring order to a creative business without spoiling the fun, manage and motivate creative people, and make money out of a design (and still enjoy it). Interviews with 25 of the company's past and present staff members that include luminaries from the design world, groundbreaking entrepreneurs, and big-hitting financial marketers provide a lively, revealing, and opinionated account of the company and industry's colorful history. Honest, informative, and entertaining, this guide to running a design firm does not claim to have all of the answers, but rather seeks to pass on the observations, lessons, and cautionary tales that only an experienced—and ultimately successful—business such as Smith & Milton could share.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Howard Milton is the founder of Smith & Milton. Nick Asbury is a freelance writer who specializes in writing for design and branding.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Bruce Tether,
This review is from: Alas! Smith & Milton: How Not to Run a Design Company (Hardcover)
I bought this book for its sub-title: "How not to run a design company" - expecting to find insight into the management of consultancies, and especially practical insight into how not to do it. In fact the book offers little if any insight into this - so the authors and publisher shoud be prosecuted under the trades description act! - only kidding!! Instead, the book offers a lively (and, as you would expect from a design book, heavily illustrated) account of the life and times of a graphics, packaging and communications design agency based in London - from its start up in the 1980s, through its going into recievership in the late 1990s and subsequent rebirth. I read it with great enjoyment from cover to cover and would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the sector, how it has developed (e.g., through the impact of computers), and operates (client relationships, the coming and going of staff, etc). If, on the other hand, you are looking for practical guidance as to how to run, or not run, a design agency, this is not the book you are looking for (but buy it anyway!).
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