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This is a kind of half of a post. It’s really an invitation to read This is what I have learned (PDF) by Milton Glaser for the AIGA National Design Conference, "Voice" in 2002. Here, he condenses 50 years of practical design wisdom into ten succinct, often counter-intuitive points. I will merely list the points, but I promise, each one is worth a read.

1. You can only work for people that you like.
2. If you have a choice never have a job.
3. Some people are toxic avoid them.
4. Professionalism is not enough or the good is the enemy of the great.
5. Less is not necessarily more.
6. Style is not to be trusted.
7. How you live changes your brain.
8. Doubt is better than certainty.
9. Solving the problem is more important than being right.
10. Tell the truth.

Milton Glaser (Via.)

Since it’s apropos to our work here, I’ll also excerpt a few bits from #10:

…it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either.

In daily life we expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and not to misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labeled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labeled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher betrays our trust by knowingly selling us spoiled meat we go elsewhere.

As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Our meat is information.