Reddit reviews Know Your Onions: Graphic Design

Perhaps try Know your onions by Drew De Soto and How to Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul by Adrian Shaughnessy.

For what it's worth, the main things I've seen throughout my career that were surprises or turnoffs to new designers when they got out into the real world were:

1) You're not doing work for yourself. It sounds obvious but most people don't even think about the fact that you design for yourself when you're learning, but when you get into the workplace you design for someone else, which isn't nearly as fun. There are clients that will let you have creative freedom, but the majority will just want you to execute their ideas, no matter how bad they are.

2) It's a people job. Some folks are drawn to design because they're introverts and they envision being able to isolate themselves and be creative all day, but that couldn't be further from the truth. If you're freelance, you have to be super extroverted to drum up business for yourself - there's more face-to-face meetings and phone calls than there is actual designing. If you're in-house or agency, you generally will be working as part of a team and there's just as much confidence and extroversion needed to be successful.

3) The hours can be long and the pace can be fast. Design is deadline driven 99% of the time. That means coming up on hard deadlines you may not have a social (or indeed family) life. Most of my work days are 8-5 or 6, but deadline weeks can be 7-midnight and through the weekends. You are the last stop on the line which means you typically inherit everyone else's delays and have to compensate for them by working fast. Working fast often means you don't have the leisure of much brainstorming and concepting. Request like "I need this 18x24 poster in 30 minutes" are not uncommon. You need to be able to handle stress well, prioritize tasks efficiently and be able to turn out work that doesn't necessarily meet your own standards of perfection.

4) They won't always go with your idea. In fact they almost never will. I've seen a lot of young designers deeply frustrated that the lovely draft they sent to the client comes back as a rejection or covered in red ink. You have to be able to not take things personally, to listen and take criticism positively, and to act on alternative ideas quickly.


All that said, it is a fulfilling career if you really have a passion for visual communication, the wage is pretty good (in larger firms and agencies at least) and you can live on it comfortably, and there are upward movement opportunities into roles such as Art Director or Creative Director. Hope some of that helps.

I believe this book gets suggested quite often on the sub, it was also recommended by my course tutor.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/9063692587?keywords=know%20your%20onions&qid=1451835390&ref_=sr_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

It covers a wide range and will get you started with principals and terminology allowing you to expand on that.

I'm sure others will post with more suggestions.

I'm a really big fan of Know Your Onions; it both serves to cover the basics of design, as well as some of the post-design process that often tends to be glossed over in other content.

There's a Web Design version as well.

Know Your Onions: Graphic Design: How to Think Like a Creative, Act Like a Businessman and Design Like a God

I am in almost the same situation.
I have also been looking for books for motivation, inspiration and so on.
Here are some stuff that keep getting recommended as well as other books that I think are interesting judging by their description and reviews (note: I haven't read anything yet I am just sharing my searching results from the past 2 or 3 days):

For creative problems

• Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
  
• Burn your Portfolio
  
• The Design Method
  
  For Inspiration
  
  
• 100 ideas that changed graphic Design
  
• Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills
  
• Graphic Design, Referenced
  
• Drawn In
  
  And this one seems to go into depth of the business itself:
  
  
• Know Your Onions
  
  Like I said, I haven't read any of those but maybe this will save some time for you or for other people searching for books.
  
  There is also Thinking with Type, The Elements of Typographic Style, Universal Principles of Design, Deign for how people learn, How to be a Graphics Designer without losing your soul.
  
  Edit: I was actually going to make a thread similar to this but I am gonna post my similar question here anyway,
  Does anybody know of more books for people who are already involved in the medium ?
  
  A lot of recommendations I see around the internet seem to be for someone just starting graphics design or still in school but rarely is it something for a higher level.

There are so many. Here is a well-written, easy to read introductory book for some of them:

https://www.amazon.com/Know-Your-Onions-Creative-Businessman/dp/9063692587

The one I recommend really helped with getting into the mindset of what an agency MD is looking for in a designer. Contains really useful & insightful tips, as well as a glossary for jargon busting.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Know-Your-Onions-Creative-Businessman/dp/9063692587