Steal Like an Artist

This one is nowhere near necessary for a startup founder, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But it was fun. I don't consider myself an artist in any sense, so it was nice to peek into an artist's brain for an afternoon. I'm on a path to develop my creative side because I'm tired of being bad at design, which is why I've been working through a stack of books on it, and this was the lightest of the bunch. You can read it in a single sitting. It's mostly images and it moves fast. The idea that stuck with me was keeping a scrapbook of things you like, a collection you steal from later. I built the digital version of that (it's the moodboard on this site) and I plan to keep adding to it. Get the physical copy if you can. Half the value for someone trying to improve their eye is watching how Kleon structures the visual stuff on the page, and that doesn't survive an e-reader. Probably skip it if you're already a designer. It's most useful if you're an engineer who lives far from the arts, like me.