Bruce Mau describes his studio as a "multi-disciplinary think tank where designers, artists and architects, curators, filmmakers and writers collaborate ..." In interviews and in his own writings, Mau rarely alludes overtly to nuts-and-bolts design issues such as typography, page design, color, and proportion. Instead, his work critically engages what he calls the "global image economy": a new world order characterized by the impact of sophisticated reproduction technology, the proliferation of logos and printed advertisements, digitally manipulated imagery, celebrity culture, and electronic commerce, among other late-twentieth-century phenomena. This book begins with a one-page text titled "Styling Life: Declaration," which succinctly defines the firm's approach and includes the statement, "Here we accept the accidents, the encounters, the interruptions and the failures of design practice along with its successes and elations." Daily experience and direct engagement with the often unstable world around us inform his work more so than theory; in effect, design for Mau is something one lives -- a life style -- rather than something one does. Text forms the armature of the book and traverses a variety of subjects germane to contemporary design culture; project documentation is inserted between the essays. The book has a tripartite structure based on the themes Life Theories (essays, credos, declarations), Life Projects (studio work from Bruce Mau Design), and Life Stories (Bruce Mau's personal anecdotes, musings, and reminiscences; memorable moments in his career). The individual texts and project documentation that make up these three sections are interwoven throughout the book instead of falling sequentially in linear fashion. Readers may move, for example, from an essay on typography to a story about meeting John Cage, to a project presentation for Zone Books.

Bruce Mau is the President and Creative Director of Bruce Mau Design. He has been a visiting scholar at institutions worldwide, including The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Rice University in Houston, the University of Toronto's School of Architecture, and California Institute of the Arts, where he was an artist-in-residence. He has lectured widely throughout North America and in Berlin and Zurich, and in 1998 won the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation.