Designprenuers, Ditch the Design Magazines

My guess is that you will never have a shortage of good design coming at you in the course of a day, week or month. Most likely you are consuming design concepts, logos, trends, articles and sites at a pace too quick to process or appreciate. Sometimes it becomes downright paralyzing. Am I right?

Accepting the Title

You're not only a designer now—you're a businessperson, a business owner. How much are you feeding this experience? Are you pursuing growth for this title? As you transitioning from I'm a designer to I own a design firm? You need to feed that growth. You need to be exercising that muscle.

Are you reading articles on leadership as well as ones on branding? Are you subscribed to the best sources for business development as well as those for UX design? What about client management? Project management? Financial strategies? I might have just made your heart seize in your chest... or for some of you I might have cracked open a new aroma of challenges and pursuits.

Here's my challenge for the next week: Subscribe to a few business oriented blogs and twitter peeps. Print just closed up shop, take the opportunity to consider a subscription to Build magazine, Inc - they even have a section on Running a business, Fastcompany, Wired, Harvard Business Review. Each of these seem to be compelling to design business.

Final note

Most of us are quick to dismiss this. It's hard, I'm not wired that way, I don't do numbers, I just want to design. But this is part of what you signed up for when you went rogue. This comes with the territory. And I'll tell you this, there might come a point where this stuff gets exciting.

Have any publications that you'd add to the list. Chime in below in the comments.