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.

A Visible Distance is a testimony to learning new things and embracing fundamental changes in popular culture, tools, technologies, and processes to make your own way in design.

“They don’t teach you a lot about business or how to start a company in design school, at least not at the public university that I went to. If I would have had Matt’s book when I decided to co-found a design office eight years ago my wandering neuroticism would have cooled down about 20 degrees and questions would have been answered by a source that’s proven their weight in gold. A Visible Distance gets to the point, by example, with real topics that design students and young professionals should be reading more of, instead of bookmarking Instagram portfolios and Tik Tok trends.” 

- Jesse Reed. Partner. Order