Customer Reviews

Designing Your Business: Strategies For Interior Design Professionals

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This is a text aimed at the student of interior design. It brings together the expertise of a business and legal professional to the practice of interior design. It aims to make students savvy business people as well as creative interior designers.

As such it includes business organization, legal and ethical issues arising in the practice of interior design, and business finance and accounting practices common to the profession.

The text features a strategic approach that guides readers in planning their careers with their personal goals and competencies in mind. The information in the book is tailored to the specific business needs of residential and contract designers. A CD included with the book features business forms and worksheets from the text for use in the books assignments as well as for later use in the students' own careers.

This book is a good attempt at getting basic business information into the hands of Interior Design students that are interested in having their own business. The publisher should have fired the editor--there are so many mistakes in the text that one begins not to trust the content. The mistakes seem to get worse starting with Chapter 9 (maybe that is when they did fire the editor and didn't replace them). If you purchase the book used and find you don't have the CD that comes with the new one, it is no great loss. The forms are not write-protected and are only in Excel format. To use them, you must be very careful to modify the text blocks so that the forms look like the book. It takes almost as much time to work with the poorly-formatted forms as the time it saves you from creating them from scratch! Another caution, the book doesn't explain the forms very well line-by-line, as in the forms where mathematical computations are done--so, don't expect to get your work correct unless your teacher warns you of the pitfalls of using the author's forms (specifically the difference between DPE multiplier and DPE rate-see form 9.1). The author spends many pages explaining non-tangible ideas from every direction as if we are idiots, then fails to make himself clear when discussing critical subjects like how to determine what to charge a client for your services. Mr. Kendall, I will sell you my book back with all your mistakes marked up, if you cannot find someone to edit your next edition (which I recommend you get to quickly).

This book has a lot of good information for interior designers and anyone thinking about starting their own business, but it also has flaws. It is mostly text with no pictures. There are some spelling errors and a couple of sentences that do not make sense because of the way they are worded. This just makes it a little harder to read, but if you can look past these characteristics, you will learn a lot.

The CD was missing, the book was advertise as new for it was clearly used in a very good condition but used. shipping was late.