Creative Careers

In The Tools, Barry Michels and Phil Stutz revolutionized the world of personal growth and self-actualization by offering doable, dynamic actions that transformed challenges into opportunities for change. Now, in Coming Alive, they provide four vital tools for tapping into the Life Force that resides within each of us - a wellspring of positive energy that is the source of creativity, renewal, confidence, and engagement.

Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity—you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn't teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done. Creative Strategy and the Business of Design fills that void and teaches left-brain business skills to right-brain creative thinkers.

Do you love gaming? Do you have ideas for games of your own and want to learn how to produce them professionally? Longtime game designer Justin Gary has the answers you seek. After 20 years in the gaming industry, creating such games as Solforge, Ascension, and the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game, Justin is now sharing all his secrets in Think Like a Game Designer. Best of all, Justin’s secrets are really simple, practical, and common sense steps you can take yourself.

Are you an entrepreneur in a creative industry? Does your business struggle with consistent profitability and cash flow? Do you feel it is a never-ending struggle to choose between doing the work you are passionate about and staying in business? Christian Brim is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Management Accountant with over twenty-five years of working with small business owners to grow profitably. Heavily influenced by a family riches-to-rags experience in his formative years, Christian has dedicated his life’s work to helping entrepreneurs have businesses that work for them.

Everyone claims to value creativity, and businesses are clamoring for disruptive thinking and innovation. Yet we often feel creatively stifled at work, because business processes seem to leave no room for real originality. In Everyday Creative, culture and creative leadership expert Mykel Dixon reveals what's holding us back from our full creative potential and explains how we can reclaim our original, vibrant selves.

Can you succeed in business when your strength is more about sensitivity than swagger? If you’re moved by meaning, more than manipulation? In other words: Can you succeed while still being you? Christine Kane is living proof that the answer is yes. Far too many of us have swallowed the notion that business owners have to be a certain way to be successful - strategy-obsessed, data-driven, and relentlessly aggressive.

Successful leaders of creative teams have mastered the difficult transition from doing the work to leading the work, and this book shows how. Todd Henry picks up where The Accidental Creative left off and provides an indispensable handbook of on-the-ground, tactical advice for new managers of creatives.

You don't have to starve to be an artist. Build a career doing what you love. In this practical guide, professional artist Lisa Congdon reveals the many ways you can earn a living by making art - through illustration, licensing, fine art sales, print sales, teaching, and beyond. Including industry advice from such successful art-world pros as Nikki McClure, Mark Hearld, Paula Scher, and more, Art, Inc. will equip you with the tools - and the confidence - to turn your passion into a profitable business.

Jump into the captivating world of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit with Creativity for Sale, an inspiring how-to guide by creative director and bestselling author Radim Malinic. Full of tried, tested, and proven insights gained from 20+ years in the creative industry, this book is your personal blueprint to turn your passion into profit.

Are you over-extended, over-distracted, and overwhelmed? Do you work at a breakneck pace all day, only to find that you haven’t accomplished the most important things on your agenda when you leave the office? The world has changed, and the way we work has to change, too. With wisdom from 20 leading creative minds, Manage Your Day-to-Day will give you a toolkit for tackling the new challenges of a 24/7, always-on workplace.

In Both/And Thinking, Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis help listeners cope with multiple, knotted tensions at the same time. Drawing from more than twenty years of pioneering research, they provide tools and lessons for transforming these tensions into opportunities for innovation and personal growth.

For generations, we’ve been taught there are two ways to succeed - either from talent or practice. In Decoding Greatness, award-winning social psychologist Ron Friedman illuminates a powerful third path - one that has quietly launched icons in a wide range of fields, from artists, writers, and chefs, to athletes, inventors, and entrepreneurs: reverse engineering.

Starting a creative company needn't cost you everything. If you agree, then you'll find wit and wisdom in this book for creative entrepreneurs. Author, artist, and graphic designer Patricia Arnold presents her best tips for starting a handmade business with this initial volume in her Creative Entrepreneur series. After starting a decade-old business with a shoestring budget and then founding a second business six years later, Patricia Arnold has a lot to say about building creative businesses from scratch.

For creators, getting that promotion to management is exciting but can also be scary. The skills that made them so successful may not translate to the skill required to be a great manager, and this gets even more complicated when managing other creatives who often don’t thrive under traditional management procedures. Creative Directions is a management masterclass in which you attend lectures and seminars as you learn from some of the best in the business.

This is an excerpt from the Military Veterans in Creative Careers book. It includes only the sections on writing books and screenwriting.

What’s the big idea? Jaime Cabrera has been asking this question and leading creative teams to the answer for over 25 years. Inspired by and featuring conversations with dozens of top creative directors from around the world on his popular podcast Confessions of a Creative Director, What’s the Big Idea is a must-have resource for any ambitious creative looking to advance their career as a creative leader at an agency, brand, or organization of any kind.

As we struggle to keep up in a knowledge economy that never sleeps, we arm ourselves with life hacks, to-do lists, and an inbox-zero mentality, grasping at anything that will help us work faster, push harder, and produce more. There’s just one problem: most of these solutions are making things worse. Creativity isn’t produced on an assembly line, and endless hustle is ruining our mental and physical health while subtracting from our creative performance.

In an era of ambiguous, messy problems - as well as extraordinary opportunities for positive change - it’s vital to have both an inquisitive mind and the ability to act with intention. Creative Acts for Curious People is filled with ways to build those skills with resilience, care, and confidence.

Lethal Leadership is a collection of three books which will help you improve your leadership skills so you can better interact with people and create significant changes in your external environment. The world needs more leaders, and this collection will help you tackle the subject of persuasion and power from multiple angles. This bundle includes The Modern-Day Polymath, The Art and Science of Storytelling, and Street Smarts. The field of leadership is constantly changing; the upcoming leader should be dynamic and capable of adapting to the environment.

Former Nike CMO Greg Hoffman shares lessons and stories on the power of creativity drawn from almost three decades of experience within Nike. A celebration of ingenuity and a call-to-arms for brand-builders to rediscover the human element in forming consumer bonds, Emotion by Design is an insider’s guide to unlocking inspiration within a brand and building stronger emotional connections with consumers.