I have been working in the graphic design business for 40 years, which represents my entire career. You’re probably not going to believe this, but nearly my entire career has been one unplanned, accidental, professional pathway after another. All I’ve ever really known for sure is that I love making things.

I’ve always been happiest when I’m making things. As soon as I could draw, I made my own coloring books, paper dolls, and birthday cards. I tried to make my own perfume by crushing rose petals into baby oil but the result was a pink, gluey mess. I made barrette boxes out of Popsicle sticks, key chains out of lanyards, ashtrays out of clay, and Halloween costumes out of construction paper and old bedsheets. I coerced my little brother to be my “student” and made lesson plans for him to complete in my make-believe school. I wrote poems on decorative doilies, adhered them to fancy paper, and mailed them in big, colorful envelopes to my grandparents in Florida. I started to write in my first-ever diary, which had a lock and a key that I kept hidden under my bed.

At the beginning of middle school, my first friend was a girl also named Debbie. She, like me, loved magazines and fashion; we both loved to write, draw, and paint. The summer after sixth grade, we spent the entire break creating a magazine, which—because we were both named Debbie—we gleefully titled Debutante. We spent endless hours writing all the articles in longhand and making elaborate illustrations with tempera paint and Bic felt-tip pens. We became consumed with the creation of this publication. We interviewed people we knew for “tell-all” articles; we initiated our own surveys about boys, clothes, and music. We loved making all our own decisions about what to include, exclude, and what we deemed culturally important—or not. The only argument we had that summer was about who would keep the one original copy of our handiwork.

My reverence for magazines continued to grow as I immersed myself in the publications my mother had around the house. I became obsessed with Betsy McCall paper dolls included in every issue of McCall’s, carefully cut out every page of Betsy’s fashionable attire, and collected them all in a manila folder. I started reading Ladies Home Journal and Vogue. I discovered “Brenda Starr” comics in the newspaper. I dreamt about becoming a journalist like Brenda and wanted a wardrobe straight off a runway, any runway.

When I enrolled at the University of Albany, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I loved art, I loved writing, and I loved music and drama, but I didn’t know how I would or could ever make a living out of pursuing these dreams. When I first arrived at UAlbany, the first thing that piqued my interest was the student newspaper. I eagerly awaited the publication of each
issue—back then the Albany Student Press came out on Tuesdays and Fridays. I fantasized about working on the paper and one courageous day made my way up to the offices on the third floor of the campus center, where I was kindly and very politely rebuked. I was so desperate to work for the paper, I imagined writing gloriously heady letters to the editor that would enthrall the staff so entirely that they would beg me to join their efforts. My romantic longing finally paid off in my junior year when no one on staff wanted to cover a women’s rights rally and I was called at the last minute to report on the feminist political uprising outside the campus health food store. I wrote for the paper all through the second semester junior year and became editor of Aspects in the spring of 1982. That was the year I first discovered design, as I realized I was just as interested in the form of the section as I was the content, and a baby designer was born. My year as editor of Aspects provided an inadvertent education that has been at the foundation of everything I’ve accomplished. While I learned everything about what I was doing in real time, without any professional education or guidance, it was truly one of the most creative and life-defining years of my life.

But when I graduated and moved to Manhattan, my self-taught, old-school layout and paste-up skills left much to be desired. In an effort to fulfill my childhood love-affair with Vogue, I dropped off my portfolio at the offices of Condé Nast the moment after I graduated college, which was the common process of reviewing potential magazine designers, illustrators, photographers, and art directors in 1983. A few days after you left it, you’d get a phone call: if they were interested in what they saw, you were invited to return for a face-to-face interview and if they didn’t, you were told to come retrieve your rejected portfolio.

Somehow, miraculously, I got a callback to come in for an interview. At the time, this was the equivalent of winning the lottery, and I spent every waking hour prior to the meeting agonizing over the contents of my “career wardrobe,” posing in outfit after outfit in an effort to ensure I would make the best possible impression. My attire consisted primarily of the clothes my mother handmade as a graduation gift, and the morning of the interview I chose the royal blue gabardine bolero jacket, a matching A-line knee length skirt, a beige faux-silk blouse with blue pin dots and a big, floppy bow in the front, sheer black stockings, and flat black patent leather loafers. I anxiously gazed at myself in the mirror before leaving my mother’s Queens apartment and took a deep breath. I knew that what happened next could change my life forever. As I sat on the cramped, balmy Express Bus into Manhattan, I fantasized befriending the human resources director, being invited up to meet the design director of Vogue or Vanity Fair, getting hired as their crackerjack assistant, working late nights and weekends, cavorting with the glamorous editors, art directors, and designers and, of course, spending my entire career being fabulously successful at what I considered to be the best magazine company in the whole wide world.

I exited the bus on 42nd Street and Madison Avenue and skipped towards the Condé Nast building, faux-silk bow billowing in the breeze, faux-leather portfolio banging against my legs when I caught the tip of my shoe in a crack in the sidewalk and tripped. I toppled so hard and so fast that three passersby came to assist me. As they asked me if I was okay, I felt my stinging knee and burning face and knew without looking that I had an ugly bruise on my leg and a vicious tear up my stockings.

I didn’t have time to change my hose, but I realized that both my skirt and the tactical placement of my portfolio could mask the bruise. I lumbered on and mercifully made it to my appointment on time.

Upon meeting the Condé Nast human resources director, I was entranced. She was unlike any other woman I’d ever encountered. She was cool and elegant and alluring in her pale yellow sleeveless shift. She had the thinnest arms I had ever seen and the biggest office I had ever been in. She invited me to sit down and I complied; as I tumbled back into the overstuffed orange chair, I felt the hole in my stockings widen and prayed that she didn’t hear the ripping sound. She quickly looked through my portfolio without speaking, and when she was finished, she shut it with a thud. She looked me up and down, and we had the following conversation:

She:
So. What kind of design do you want to do?

Me:
Excuse me?

She:
What kind of design do you want to do?

Me:
Kind of design?

She:
(Said with a furrowed brow) Yes.

Me:
Um…I think I would like to do any kind of design…

She:
You can’t do any kind of design. You have to pick.

Me:
Pick?

She:
(Said with a very furrowed brow) Yes. You have to pick. You have to pick editorial design or promotional design or advertising or custom publishing. You must choose one.

I sat there for a moment and thought to myself:
…well I really want to say editorial but maybe I am not good enough and though I don’t know what custom publishing or promotional design are, I will say “promotional” but really, I honestly will happily sweep the floors if they want me to…

Finally, I cleared my throat and said:
Promotional?

And then I couldn’t help myself. I continued talking.

Me:
But I would do anything. Anything. Anything you need.

And then there was silence.

And she responded:
Well. Okay, then. I see.

And with that, she sighed and made one sweeping gesture for me to take back my portfolio. I looked at her and picked it up. I made some small talk as I was escorted out: I remember asking how long she had been at Condé Nast, and I remember her replying, “12 years,” with the slightest clip in her voice. Though she said she would be in touch, I knew that I was not going to hear from her, and I never, ever did.

Several months later, in a moment of aberrant fearlessness, I got up my nerve and called her, but the person who answered the phone told me she no longer worked there. By then I had gotten my first job as a traffic girl at a fledgling magazine called Cableview about a new category of television called cable. When I worked there, I learned about editorial design, promotional design, advertising, and custom publishing. And for a time I loved it. I worked late nights and weekends and cavorted with the editors, art directors, and designers. But the professional politics at that little magazine were almost more than this entry-level designer could bear.

The next ten years of my career were what I call exercises in rejection and despair. I stumbled from job to job. I freelanced and sometimes got paid, and sometimes didn’t. I despaired that I had no role models or guidance and no way of knowing if what I was making of my life was legitimate. The only advice I got was to “fake it until I make it,” but that felt unauthentic and phony. I didn’t know so many things! What constituted good design? How much should I really be charging? What should I do if someone didn’t pay my invoices? How could I best protect myself in a cut-throat business that I was still learning about? How could I improve my skills
and get bigger clients? How could I find a better full-time job?

Just when I thought I might forever live in this spiral of confounding questions, I discovered the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook. This was yet another accident: I was sitting in a client’s reception area, waiting for an art director who seemed to be delayed for an indefinite amount of time. Bored and abandoned, I scanned the magazines and books on the coffee table in front of me, desperate for something to occupy my attention. That’s when I saw the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook. It was well-worn and dog-eared. The spine was cracked, and it appeared as if some of the pages had been torn out. Intrigued, I picked it up.

To say that my chance encounter with the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook was dumb luck would be an understatement. Rather, it was a life-changing revelation. Right there in front of me were the answers to every question I had about the graphic design business. Suddenly there were methodologies and solutions to the issues I had faced on my own. There was guidance on contracts, copyright, and licensing. There were templates for estimates, billing, and collection. There was advice on procuring new business, insurance, and ethics. In short, the handbook became my teacher, my confidante, and my bible. It helped me improve my business, the way I practice graphic design, and ultimately, it improved my life.

The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook is now 51 years old. The book you are now holding in your hand is the 17th edition. It is the only tried and true, comprehensive guide to the graphic design business in the world, and it is unrivalled in its contents, its guidance, and its expertise. My career began ten years after the first edition was published, but it took me another ten years to discover it. I loved
making things then, and I still love making things now. But having the handbook by my side through my circuitous journey of making things has helped me understand that you don’t ever need to “fake it until you make it.” Finding the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook has allowed me to “make it until I made it,” and it is the one trusted source of guidance I’ve ever needed since. I hope it can do the
same for you.

—Debbie Millman
March, 2024