I got into the book industry through people I went to school with at SVA. A few of them were already working in publishing by the time I graduated, and one connection led to Sterling Publishing. That’s where things started to click.

Victore had given me the critical thinking. How to interrogate a brief, how to have a position, how to make work that said something. The problem was I couldn’t apply any of it aesthetically. Graphic design felt arbitrary to me. I could argue for one typeface or color choice exactly as convincingly as I could argue for another. Nothing was right or wrong. It was all taste, and taste wasn’t enough to hang a decision on.

So I started looking for where design could be right or wrong. Where the thinking had teeth.

Book covers were the same problem. Beautiful work, but fundamentally aesthetic. You could defend any direction if you talked well enough. Interior layout was the opposite problem: mechanical, template-driven, no thinking required. You dropped text into a grid someone else made and moved on. Neither one wanted what I had to offer.

Catalog layout was different. Catalog pages and ad promo work were information architecture. You had products, descriptions, pricing, categories, cross-references. The page had to organize all of it so a buyer could find what they needed and act on it. Hierarchy mattered. Flow mattered. Wayfinding mattered. These weren’t opinions. The reader finds the product or they don’t. The page communicates or it doesn’t. You could make a choice and defend it with something other than “I think this looks better.”

That was the first time my design thinking found material that would hold it. Victore had taught me to think critically and have something to say. The industry wouldn’t let me say it through aesthetics. Catalog work let me say it through structure. Every decision served communication, not taste. Every choice was accountable to function.

I didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet. I wouldn’t have called it information architecture at the time. But I recognized the feeling: this is the kind of problem where thinking is welcome. Where the work can be evaluated, not just appreciated. Where you can be wrong, which means you can also be right.

That distinction shaped everything that came after. The move from aesthetic design to structural design, from taste to function, from arguing for choices to proving them. Sterling was where the systems path started, even if I didn’t know that’s what it was called.