A person I follow on Twitter yesterday tweeted a very interesting article about advice on graphic design and the act of creating art in general. Some of my favorites listed are below, I’ve linked to the entire article and highly recommend its reading. Enjoy

• If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life.
• The things your teachers tell you in class are not gospel.
• You will get conflicting information. It means that both are wrong. Or both are true.
• Libraries are a good place.
• Patina is a pretty word, and a beautiful concept.
• Develop a point of view.
• Design doesn’t have to sell. Although, that’s usually its job.
• Helvetica is nice too, but it won’t turn water to wine.
• Reject most of your initial ideas.
• Change contexts when you’re stuck.
• If you say “retro” too much you will get hives and maybe die.
• Learn your design history.
• Graphic design has just as much to do with words as it does with pictures.
• Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it’s hard to make things more radical.
• Aesthetics are fleeting, the only things with longevity are ideas.
• Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling.
• It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope.
• Success is generating an emotion.
• Failure is a million different things.
• Everyone is just making it up as they go along.

Read the rest of this very enlightening article and many more points of great advice here.