Let me admit a real prejudice that I have, and maybe you can try to convince me that I’m wrong: it’s my belief that you just can’t get great design out of a design agency with a staff larger than a dozen or two. Design doesn’t scale well, in my opinion, or at least it doesn’t do so easily.

This craft, and whatever pretensions to art it can pull off, rests so much on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. This means that in its ideal form, it works best when practiced by a single person. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish — a straight shot from the right brain to the wrist — maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout.

Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical. For design to work as a business, it almost always has to scale to some degree. The smaller the scale, though, the more efficient the practice of design; transmitting ideas among a small number of people is much more effective than transmitting them among a large number.

Are you a designer in need of a job? Well, we need designers at the NYTimes.com design group, almost as bad as we need a new interface for our job board. Sometimes the board works, and sometimes it doesn’t, so when I post this link to a description for a position I need to fill soon, you’ll have to forgive me if happens to not be functioning properly when you click on it. Enterprise software is like that.

Okay, to be honest the board is terrible. But that shouldn’t reflect poorly on the job opportunity — the opportunity is a really great one. We’ve got a really, really terrific team and we’re doing fascinating, challenging and very rewarding work. And we also happen to be working at the greatest news company on the planet. In my opinion.

I could actually run the full description of the job here, but I’ve learned in the past that people tend to submit their résumés regardless of their suitability to whatever bullet points I point them to. Usually, they just respond to the title, which in this case is “Web Designer.” Still, I’ll supplement it here with this advice: if you’re a fantastic Web designer, then we want you. And you really have to be fantastic. I’m serious. Also, you have to be clever enough to be able to figure out how our crazy job board works.

Very witty.

Shots triggered by motion sensor. Via Photojojo’s Mother’s Day Gift Guide.

Generally, I think it’s great when companies adopt a bit of the customer-friendly approach to designing and packaging products that most of us have come to associate with Apple. I’m talking about the premise that, even after the consumer has handed over her money for a physical product, the process of opening up its packaging and using it for the first time should be as seductive and reassuring as was the experience of having been sold on it in the first place — if not more enjoyable, even.

Take, for example, this external hard drive that I bought recently from Seagate: an inexpensive model called the FreeAgent. I’ve never thought of Seagate, a well-respected hard drive manufacturer but not a particularly friendly brand, as being very consumer-focused, but I have to admit they surprised me. Mostly.

Interview with band leader Jason Pierce and designer Mark Farrow discussing the beautiful packaging they’ve worked on together for the band’s past decade of releases.

“Since the iPhone went on sale last summer, amid long lines of shoppers and media adulation, the contours of the smartphone market have begun to shift rapidly toward consumers… R.I.M., which has historically viewed big corporations and wireless carriers as its bedrock customers, needs to alter its DNA in a hurry.”

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Nice.

Cleverly designed marketing site from LessAccounting, cited by Dan Cederholm as a nice example of parallax scrolling.

An overview of an excellent presentation by Nova Spivack.

“A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000.”

You know that drawer you have in your kitchen that’s full of rubber bands, pens, take-out menus, birthday candles, miscellaneous kitchen utensils, string, magnets and all sorts of other junk? That, to me, is what my RSS reader feels like. No matter how much I try to organize it, it’s always in disarray, overflowing with unread posts and encumbered with mothballed feeds.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending chunks of time here and there trying to clean out the drawer, so to speak, organizing the many, many feeds that I’ve haphazardly stashed inside various folders and subfolders within NetNewsWire. My goal has been to group them into some sort of hierarchy that will allow me to make better use of them, to cluster them together logically. Not necessarily by content type, but rather in use-oriented ways, like how often they’re published or how often I tend to read them.

The whole process frustrates me though, mostly because I feel like I shouldn’t have to do it at all. The software should just do it for me. I acknowledge that some customization is often — if not always — necessary to get the most efficient use out of any given software. But moreso than with most classes of software, it’s my feeling that RSS readers shortchange users with only half of the features we need to get the job done.

Signed copies are on sale now.

For like two weeks I’ve been tinkering with a draft of a new blog post, but I can’t seem to get it done. As time goes by, I get more and more skeptical of whether or not I can bang it into good enough shape to somehow qualify as a sufficiently worthy ‘comeback post.’ To plausibly excuse my little hiatus away from blogging, I feel compelled to return to the fray with nothing less than a screed that’s somehow good enough. Whatever that means, I haven’t quite got it, I know.

Not to say that I’m taking all of this so seriously. In fact, I think I’m taking this weblog less seriously than I have before. I admit sheepishly that there was a time, a few years ago, when blogging was one of the most important things in any given day of my life. And sometimes, often enough to be regrettable, it disproportionately dominated my priorities when it really shouldn’t have.

So there are a lot of reasons I’m not blogging right now with quite the alacrity that I have in the past. My day job is busier than ever at the moment, seemingly (and piled on, this week anyway, with extracurricular questions and answers). The weather’s turned nice in New York, too. Finally there’s daylight when I climb out of the subway from my evening commute, and I can wear a tee-shirt to walk Mister President even when the thermometer hits the day’s lows — which I would rather do than sitting in front of my computer. Also, I finally realized: living life is more important than blogging about design.

Was there something you wanted to ask me about my day job as design director at NYTimes.com? If so, you should head on over to the site — or just send an email to askthetimes@nytimes.com — and pose your query, because all week long I’ll be answering reader questions in our regular “Talk to the Newsroom” series. I’m going to try my best to come across competently, but if you really want insight into the way The Times works, be sure to peruse the previous installments in this Q & A series in the archives, too.

Klas Ernflo’s stunningly beautiful but torpedoed designs for a series focusing on classic artists. Via Aisle One.

New gadget boutique in New York City.

“Entrants must be 30 years of age or younger and must have been working professionally for at least 2 years (both full-time and freelance work qualify). Entrants can submit both professional and personal, unpublished work. Fifty new ADC Young Guns will be chosen.”

The venerable British design magazine goes independent.

Graphical interface for opening up ports on your home network so that they might be accessed remotely.

A welcome stand against the reflexive and often unofficial prohibition against camera usage in perfectly situations.

On the list for whenever I visit Switzerland. Via Aisle One.

Some are gorgeous. Some are cheesy.

In my search for some kind of memory-enhancing, panacean note-keeping application, I’ve had to confront again what is becoming an increasingly common conundrum: do I want a solution that lives on the desktop or on the network?

Despite the significant leaps forward seen in online applications in recent years — Google Docs and the 37signals suite of apps, to name just a few — I still find most of this stuff slower, less efficient and less integrated with the way I prefer to maintain my own personal information ‘cloud’ than desktop software.

Given the choice, I’ll almost always opt for the native speed of an application written in Cocoa, the ability to call it up with suddenness and satisfaction via Quicksilver or from the Mac OS X Dock, and seamless, peer-level cohabitation with the data stored inside my Mac OS X Address Book, iCal other local data resources.

Three days after King was assassinated, Nina Simone and her band performed “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” a beautiful tribute written by their bass player Gene Taylor.

“If you’d ask me to describe the state of the newspaper industry based on the scary coverage about it alone, I would have guessed that it had fallen by half and that we were back to 1970s levels. Instead, it’s a US$45 billion business, which is twice as big as Google and Yahoo combined.”

Scary realization: more and more often, I’m finding I have no useful recollection of the details of conversations I’ve had in the recent past. You might have sat with me in a meeting last week, say, and we may have come to perfectly lucid agreements on what steps we’d take next to advance whatever project was at hand. But lately the chances are increasingly good that when you ask me about them next, those action items will have escaped me. I’ll probably recall that we spent some time in a meeting together, sure. And maybe even that we had arrived at some mutual understanding, too. But little else.

This is really inconvenient, not to mention frustrating. At first I thought this condition was a symptom of the sheer number of projects I deal with each day (lots), but more and more I worry it’s just a function of getting along in my years. Office life is making me old.

If you really want to see graphic communication — the artful combination of images and words put in service to narrative — at its most powerful, then have a look at this picture of my nephew reading a copy of “Explorers on the Moon,” the seventeenth in master draughtsman and storyteller Hergé’s long line of Tintin comic albums, which he acquired last week during our trip to visit my dad, his grandfather, in Paris.

Truly gorgeous animated screen saver.

Truly gorgeous animated screen saver.

Exquisite handiwork from Coudal.

Brilliant 1957 April Fool’s hoax.