I had planned to write about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse this week, but as I only got started on it mid-week and it was a week particularly fraught with all sorts of time sucks–travel, illness, and a new client job (this is relevant)–it very quickly became clear that I was not going to have time to finish the book before the week’s end.

Still, I did finish a book this week. I actually finished it much earlier in the week, but I wasn’t planning to write about it until I found myself unable to finish To the Lighthouse on top of it. I think I feel self-conscious about reading books that are exclusively professionally relevant and therefore self-serving and not of interest to a general audience. Still Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job was a solid book full or amazing down-to-earth advice on being a designer and working with clients, e.g.,

Over the years the one constant that we’ve been able to rely on is that how a potential client behaves in the business development process is exactly how they will behave during the project. Trust your gut. If they’re slow to return your calls now, while they’re trying to engage you, they’ll be just as slow later. If gathering requirements or technical constraints is hard, then gathering feedback will be just as hard, if not harder. If your conversations reveal a May Day parade of red flags, then disengage. You will not be able to do good work, and neither you nor the client will be well-served.

and features that advice alongside advice on how, at the same time, to live with yourself and be a better person:

Carefully choose the projects you take on. Choose to leave the world better than you found it. Improve things for people. This doesn’t mean just working on non-profit or purely mission-driven projects. A lot of commercial products and services improve life for people in large and small ways. Just make sure there is some meaning to what you are doing besides exploiting a niche. Be the advocate for the person who will ultimately buy, use, or experience what you are designing.

We have limited resources, whether natural, financial, or cognitive. Don’t contribute to people wasting them on crap.

I’ve done freelance work as a designer in the past and I’m planning on doing more in the future, though I’ve always been a little skeptical of my ability to successfully run a business. Reading this book certainly hasn’t given me complete assurance of my ability, but it has made me feel more confident and able than I was before. I feel that I have a much better sense now of how to interact with clients on a professional level–how to be both firm and pleasant with them. I’m sure I’ll still make mistakes, but I know that I’ll learn from them.

But more than that: I’ve found that in almost any work that I do, even as part of my full-time job, it can be a benefit to think of our role as that of an independent design shop. Negotiating with the higher-ups in the Oberlin College administration is not so different from negotiating with freelance clients, and much of Monteiro’s advice stands in both situations. For instance, on presenting a design:

Put your audience at ease by letting them know that they’re exactly the right people to have in the room, and what you need from them is their expertise with the product or service, not design knowledge.

Steer the discussion away from personal subjectivity by outlining good topics of feedback: how well the proposed solutions meet specific metrics, whether their voice and brand are coming through, etc. Encourage them to stay in their own zone of expertise and they won’t attempt to hop on yours.

And did I mention that Monteiro is funny? The book is a pleasure to read all the way through. Take for instance this passage from the chapter on charging for work (which I read over and over again, because talking about money is the most unpleasant part of any job for me):

My friend Anil Dash once said that if you hand a client an estimate and slap them across the face and they complain about the slap, then the estimate wasn’t high enough. The best part is that he was actually a client when he said that.

Admittedly that joke came from someone else, but still. Mike’s a funny guy.

Obviously this book isn’t relevant to everyone, but I think it’s a little more generally relevant than the title suggests. It contains advice that’s useful to anyone who provides a creative service to clients for pay. If that’s you, I highly recommend reading it.