On a recent visit to the Richard Diebenkorn: The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966 exhibition at San Francisco’s De Young fine arts museum, I was taken with a small, simple sheet of paper handed to visitors, printed on which were the artists’ ten rules for beginning a painting — a sort of manifesto that applies in various degrees and various dimensions to just about every creative or intellectual endeavor, making a fine addition to these favorite manifestos for the creative life. Friend-of-Brain Pickings and frequent contributor Debbie Millman, who knows a thing or two about hand-lettered wisdom and typographic poetics, has kindly rendered Diebenkorn’s script here in her signature script — please enjoy:

Complement this with Salvador Dalí’s creative credo. The Diebenkorn exhibition, fantastic in its entirety, can be experienced remotely in the companion book.