Self-Portrait as Your Traitor by Debbie Millman is a collection of illustrated essays and poems featuring her own hand-lettered and mixed-media typography.

“Debbie Millman combines insights about design and everyday life with obsessive hand-drawn typography to create a new form of visual poetry, a 21st-century illuminated manuscript. That is, each piece of lettering seems to have been created to express the exact emotional subject matter at hand. A designer knows how to do this: to manipulate the visual components in order to evoke the appropriate feeling. It is a planned act. But a fine artist does it for herself, spontaneously, without a client or a brief. Debbie’s elaborate doodles have more in common with Ed Fella’s work than with editorial design. These drawings are communication from the heart. And they are the bravest, rawest, and most honest form of communication there can be. “ - Paula Scher

Get an exclusive look inside the book below.

"For those who have fallen for Debbie's profound, confessional artwork in the 2009 Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design, or in her monthly visual pieces for Print magazine online, this new book will be one to celebrate and share with those not yet familiar with the artistic insights of one of America's preeminent design commentators and brand strategists.

In Self-Portrait as Your Traitor, Debbie's varied and playful typography, together with her remarkable illustrations and poignant prose and verse, visually map the myriad and magical collisions between love, loss, longing, self-doubt, ambition, community, creativity, and more. Debbie's work challenges us to face our assumptions about emotional relationships in the workplace, career versus calling, women's ambitions, the form of a poem, and what we assign value—be it creative or commercial."

Designed by Debbie Millman, New York, New York

Introduction: Paula Scher

Publisher: HOW Books