For every cheap, disposable quotidian object, someone makes a ridiculously expensive version that makes you want to pay more. I feel it.

A New York City-based design consultancy that creates “custom gift experiences that carefully consider the relationship between the giver and the recipient.”

Beautiful if not always legible typographic illustrations.

Okay, folks, just in time for holiday shopping: brand new Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee-shirts are now on sale — and what’s more, the first ever printing of my Fear of a Cooper Black tee-shirts are also available. To buy both of these, you’ll need to point your browser to Wire & Twine, the superb tee-shirt operation run, in part, by the amazing Chris Glass.

I am motivated, professionally, by this idea that I can always do better — or, more accurately, that whatever level of accomplishment I can currently claim isn’t enough. In a sense, I don’t allow myself to enjoy whatever success I’ve attained; I’m forever re-assessing my status or beating myself up for not yet having reached some higher, better plateau that seems to lie perpetually just beyond my grasp. I don’t let up on myself.

This isn’t bragging, nor is it career advice. It’s a strategy that got me where I am today, but it’s exacted its own kind of price. As much as I try, and as intent as I am on reshaping my behavior, I have a difficult time appreciating what’s good about my life. And this careerist sensibility bleeds over into my personal arena, too. It’s caused me to have a hard time creating consistently meaningful relationships with the people I care about. Or maybe this perpetual dissatisfaction was hardwired into me deeper down, turning me into an efficient desk jockey on the one hand, while on the other hand leading me to continually seek other, ‘better’ relationships — meanwhile becoming disaffected and disconnected from those I care about.

Either way, it’s not a sustainable strategy for living. I realized lately that I haven’t done a good job appreciating what I have or, especially, who I have in my life. I’m not completely without gratitude, but I have spent a lot of time in the company of people supposedly near to me while daydreaming about being elsewhere — thinking about design, or playing on my computer, or just not being present. On the whole, I think that I would have had a much nicer time these past three and a half decades if I’d just been mentally there, if I’d really appreciated the people around me, let them know that I was really with them, and happily so. I would have had a lot more fun, and I think those in my life would have, too.

I’m going to start doing a better job with that. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

This is the GTD-based task management system I alluded to in last week’s post.

First-, second- and third-graders draw imaginary laptops on construction paper and pretend to e-mail each other.

Funniest thing all day.

It’s Friday and everyone’s exhausted, so I just thought I’d throw this out there to maybe brighten up a few folks. Herewith, test prints for a brand new batch of my Hel-Fucking-Vetica shirts. Yes, I’ve finally gotten around to re-running them — or am nearly ready to get them run, anyway. With a little luck, they’ll be ready in time for holiday sales and shipping. What better way to celebrate during the December holidays than with a little typographic profanity?

From 19th century lithographer Karl Klimsch.

Much-needed design-friendly alternative to Evite.

Like a lot of people, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that how I manage to-do items is more of a perpetual journey than an achievable goal. I have yet to come across the perfect task manager, and despite some intermittent progress, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that I ever will. So, periodically, I find myself possessed with an urge to overhaul my system — because of inherent shortcomings in my existing methods that have scaled to intolerable inconveniences, because of changes in my working style or my life, or because newly introduced productivity tools promise to make the ongoing search more interesting.

So in this spirit, I’ve been playing with a few new task managers lately. I’ve had mixed success, but one thing I can say: this new round of candidates has definitely confirmed my previously stated opinion that most thinking in the “Getting Things Done” school of productivity is far too elaborate for me.

For over a year, my daily to-do list has more or less been managed in an entirely manual fashion; every morning I create a new list and copy over incomplete items from the previous day’s list. It’s an approach that’s not completely at odds with GTD, but neither does it adhere particularly closely to David Allen’s principles. But one of the to-do applications I’ve flirted with (currently in pre-release state, so I won’t talk about it in too much depth) is so thoroughly committed to the GTD way that it’s more of a hindrance than a help for me. After the initial delight of getting my hands on a fairly powerful task management machine, I’ve become weary of its apparent and frequently unavoidable complexity.

I just watched this nicely done promotional video for Pentagram.

Way back in the day I worked at a place where the boss was kind of a jerk. But, I have to admit, he did at least one thing very well that I cannot take away from him: he documented the progress of his studio with great assiduousness. This included, every few months, getting the whole staff together for a group photo.

When you think about it, you spend so much time with the people at work, maybe even more than you do with members of your own family, during certain periods. And, so often, there is no record of the people with whom you’re sharing that time. That’s why I thought it was so smart to take those photographs periodically; the practice stuck with me.

Even though it’s only November, I’ve been sitting around thinking about next year, specifically about what I’m going to do with it. As I indicated recently, my plan is to scale back on the number of speaking engagements I’ll do in 2008. Partly, I want more time at home and less time at the mercy of the airlines. And partly my plan is to spend at least some of that time writing a book. (I’m nervous even saying that here because who knows if I really have it in me to actually finish writing a book, to say nothing of getting it published.)

What kind of book, you might ask? Well, I’ve decided that it’s not going to be a book about typographic grids, in spite of what modest sums of notoriety I’ve achieved with regard to that subject. Beyond what I’ve committed to blog posts and extemporized at conferences so far, I just don’t think I have much more to say about grids. They’re a valuable and fascinating tool for design, but I feel that, for now anyway, I’ve reached an upper limit on my ability to add to the discourse.

What other subject, then, for this so-called book I’m allegedly planning to write? It’s something that’s still germinating, so it would be premature to go into detail on it now. If and when I get further down the road with it — and if I get a sufficient, confidence-building head of steam — I fully expect to be drafting at least parts of the manuscript in public view on this blog. So not to worry; if it ever becomes a real thing and not just me talking aimlessly, then you’ll get more posts about the book than you care to read about right here.

However, without going into too much detail, I can offer one high-level idea of what kind of product I’m going for: it should be the kind of book that simplifies the shopping experience at your local Barnes & Noble bookseller.

Excellent summary of and reaction to my post “Something’s Missing in Web Design.”

“Now in its fourth year, Personal Views is a unique series of conferences that brings together an unparalleled group of designers, writers and educators from the world of graphic design.” The list of past speakers — with recaps and some with video — is impressive.

For US$399, you get a laptop and a child in Africa does, too. I just bought mine.

Enables screen captures of Web pages, in whole or in part.

“ Provides a window into the overall digital experience of The New York Public Library.” Thanks to Paul K.

New site from the brains behind Ideas on Ideas allows people to list their favorite everything.

Two mildly controversial and seemingly unrelated blog posts were written last week that you shouldn’t miss. First, on Tuesday, Armin Vit asked “Where are all the ‘landmark’ Web sites?” over at Speak Up. His contention is that we have yet to see examples of Web design in the fashion of “Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster; Paul Rand’s IBM logo; Paula Scher’s Public Theater posters; Massimo Vignelli’s New York subway map; [and] Kyle Cooper’s ‘Seven’ opening titles.” In short, Armin claims that the practice of design online has yet to produce its own canon of seminal and iconic works that can stand their own in the history books of the profession.

Then, over at our very own A Brief Message on Thursday, interaction designer extraordinaire Dan Saffer argues that making stuff is better than making stuff up. “It is in the detail work that design really happens — that the clever, delightful moments of a design occur,” he asserts. “Those are as important, if not more so, than the concept itself.” It’s a provocative argument that seeks to let a little air out of the notion that designers have more to offer as thinkers and planners than as craftspeople.

Naturally, I have an interest in pointing folks to Dan’s excellent article because of my involvement as publisher at A Brief Message (keep clicking on those ads, folks). But I refer to it here not just out of self-interest, but also because I think that, though uncoordinated, both of these posts actually tackle the same issue from different vantage points. Or, rather, I should say that Dan’s post, in a roundabout way, provides an answer to Armin’s post.

In order to recover a bit from a recent feeling of exhaustion, I spent a significant amount of this past weekend diligently sitting on my ass, in front of the television. On Saturday night, I popped in my copy of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan,” which, among other things, is as stunningly designed a movie as I’ve ever seen. This is largely thanks to the work of Gordon Willis, a master cinematographer who, apart from his incredible work on this film, was also responsible for photographing an alarmingly high share of my favorite movies of all time: “The Godfather,” “The Godfather Part II,” “All the President’s Men,” and “The Parallax View,” among others.

If you’ve watched these films, then you know what I mean: they strike an uncanny balance between the naturalism that dominated film discourse during the 1970s and a kind of visual abstraction, an artful sense of framing that treated actors and scenery alike as stark compositional images. On the other hand, if you haven’t seen these films, take a look at these captures to see what I mean…

Guest opinion article contends that revenue-sharing in Major League Baseball needs to be fixed.

“At the Museums and the Web conference in April, I predicted that we would reach 200 museum blogs by the end of the year. It now appears that we might be closer to 300.” Via Unbeige.

“The DynaTAC 8000X dates back to the early 1980’s and was one of the first mobile phones approved by the FCC.”

It’s no accident that editor Liz Danzico and I came up with the idea for and launched A Brief Message this year, of all years. Brevity is a meme with a lot of currency today. You can see it not just at our site, where the design opinions and the reader responses run no longer than two hundred words a piece, but at completely different sites like Twitter, Pownce and Tumblr too, where the economy of words is so sparing that it might take hours before you come across a sentence with a fully formed subject-verb-predicate construction. Similarly, Very Short List offers a kind of editorial curation that, in years past, might have run much longer than its two- or three-paragraph average length. Think Suck.com

People’s attention spans are shorter, for sure, but there’s an argument that, by accommodating shorter attention spans, sites like ours are only compounding the problem. Some people, in fact, find the whole trend alarming (a prominent design writer whom we invited to contribute to A Brief Message politely replied, and I’m paraphrasing, that he was ‘against everything we stood for’). And if you look at an outlet like Brijit, even champions of brevity like myself might give pause.

Through a questionnaire, “connects you to the presidential candidate that represents your beliefs the best.”

Setting aside whether the aesthetic or style of my design is particularly original or not, I have a way of solving design problems that’s predictable, at least. For better or worse, there are certain tropes, tendencies, tricks and clichés that I repeatedly enlist in the pursuit of a design solution. I thought to myself the other day, wouldn’t it be fun to list them all out?