Matt Owens, A Visible Distance, Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design, 2024

This design guide is aimed at students, educators, and seasoned professionals, providing tactical strategies and creative support for dealing with the complexities of balancing intuition and taste, technical and personal skills, strategic business decisions in design work, and the demands of building a modern brand.

Part personal memoir and part professional handbook by Matt Owens, A Visible Distance, Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design is a reality check of the challenges to be faced when building a graphic design or branding studio. The lessons and learnings span the last several decades: from its roots in DIY, punk, and skateboarding in the late 1980s, to the advent of Internet commercialization in the late 1990s, to building and growing a creative agency, to the current disruption of artificial intelligence, automation, and distributed hybrid teams.

A Visible Distance is a testament to learning new things and accepting fundamental changes in popular culture, tools, technologies, and processes to make one’s way in design.