Matt Owens — A Visible Distance: Craft, Creativity, and the Business of Design

Matt Owens on building and running a design practice, written as half memoir and half working manual.

Owens is a co-founder of Athletics, a brand studio in Brooklyn, where he is Chief Design and Innovation Officer. He studied graphic design at Cranbrook, worked as an art director at Methodfive, ran a small studio of his own and self-published Volumeone, an experimental design quarterly made in Flash.

The book follows his career from the DIY, punk and skateboarding scenes of the late 1980s, through the arrival of the commercial internet in the late 1990s and the growth of an agency, up to the present, with artificial intelligence, automation and hybrid, distributed teams. As it goes, he offers practical ways of weighing intuition and taste against technical skill and business decisions. It is written for students, teachers and working designers.

Margaret Dodge edited the book and Owens designed it himself. It has 34 colour images and is sewn, and it was printed by Printon in Tallinn. The first printing, in February 2024, was 4,000 copies.

Set Margins', 2024. 236 pages, softcover with flaps, 15.2 x 22.9 cm.