Hasta La Ideas

In an incredibly affectionate and useful advice piece for design students, Jessica Helfand gets her maternal on (in a good way) with An Open Letter to Design Students Everywhere. Here’s something for the tattoo parlor:

If you don’t already do it, start keeping a notebook. Travel everywhere with it, as you do with things like your camera and your cell phone: consider the notebook an extension of your mind and of your studio. Do not wait to get back to your desk to write things down or, better yet, to draw them. If you draw something every day, you will find, over time, that your facility with the pencil is a huge boon to thinking visually. If the notebook is with you all the time, you can afford to be a little unfocused. Later on, you’ll look at what you wrote and saved and drew and you will realize that without even trying, you created a time-capsule that is, itself, a manifestation of what mattered. Instant, retroactive focus.

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