The Advice 12 Designers Wish They Could Give To Their Younger Selves

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Go with your gut. Relax, it’s only work.What advice would you give your younger self? It’s a perennial question, for anyone interested in gleaning the life advice of the older and wiser.

When its 30th anniversary, the foil and film materials company Foilco decided to celebrate its age by asking 30 designers what advice they’d give their younger selves. The results, designed by StudioDBD‘s Dave Sedgwick, are presented in beautiful graphic form, with each designer’s answer given its own typographical due in a book and in a collection of animations online.

Some pieces of advice are design related. “Design is about other people,” writes Christopher Doyle, of Christopher Doyle & Co. “Graphic design is not everything. Graphic design will not save you,” says Michael C. Place of Build. “Don’t look at design to inform your design,” writes Paul Hutchison of Hype Type Studio. Others apply to anyone, creative or otherwise. “Enjoy yourself and find interesting people to work with,” writes the graphic artist Anthony Burrill. “Hustle hustle hustle,” encourages Yah-Leng Yu, a designer at Foreign Policy. “Listen to the voice in your head. It’s who you are,” says Tony Brook of Spin. “The difficult things are usually the things worth doing,” writes Kathleen Sleboda of Gluekit.Flip through the rest of the 30 designers’ inspiring words in the slide show above, and on the project’s website.