Choose a Job, Choose a life

from ID magazine
Choose a Job, Choose a life.
when we set out to ask a few of our favorite design leaders about the best business decision they'd ever made, we never guessed the results would be so personal.
Milton Glaser:
The best business decision I ever made was actually two related ones, the first was joining with Ed Sorel, Seymour Chawast, and Reynold Reffins to create Pushpin studios in 1954. We had a different view of graphic design than what was popular at the time, which was Swiss and Bauhaus modernism. Our idea was to celebrate and plunder all the ideas that were considered to be inappropriate then -ornament, storytelling,complexity. We also linked illustration and design and considered both activities part of a single intention. After 15 years or so, the studio became famous and influential. Our success culminated in an important exhibition at the Louvre's Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris in 1970. We had become part of the mainstream, although we were still considered marginal by those committed to modernism. Later, one critic called us premature post-modernists.
My other decision was to leave Pushpin, with some trepidation, 20 years after we had begun it. I felt people knew too much about us and had begun to expect a certain kind of product, which I found limiting. I opened a small office in 1974 with the intention of doing things I had not done before, including interiors, objects, architecture. It worked out fine.
Karim Rashid:
The best business decision I ever made was to get a really rigorous education in industrial design. I was going to study fine arts, and if I had, I would be most likely be jobless right now. Design is democratic art.