For the record, I really do think that open systems are better than closed ones. But not always. Sometimes, open systems turn into a complete mess.

I was thinking about this as we get into the holiday season, a time when lots of new consumer audio-visual electronics are purchased and make their ways into our homes. Last year I purchased what was recommended to me as a very good “home theater in a box,” i.e., a single-unit, multi-speaker system that serves as a central hub for audio from my cable box, Mac mini, Apple TV, Blu-Ray player, Wii console etc. Along with our television, it’s the principal interface for basically everything my family does in the living room.

Over a year ago my friend Allan Cole and I released Basic Maths, our theme for WordPress, which was an instant hit. This week we’re releasing a new update — Basic Maths 1.1.

This new version includes a slew of significant enhancements, including: full compatibility with WordPress 3.0, easier logo customization, improved CSS support for embedded video, smarter conditional logic for widgets and article-to-article navigation and more. Read more about it or buy your copy at the official site.

Maybe the coolest part of Basic Maths 1.1 is the brand new, iPhone-friendly view. Any user viewing a site running this newest version of our theme will see a mobile-optimized presentation of the exact same content. As a blog publisher, the only configuration you have to do is — nothing. It all happens automatically.

The Canadian graphic design organization RGD Ontario was kind enough to invite me to speak at their annual Design Thinkers conference in Toronto last week. It was a quick trip for me — I flew in and out of the city on the same day — but they made it really fun. In addition to a lecture I gave about the difficulties that the practice of art direction has in finding a place in digital media (I’ll post some notes from that talk in a few days), I also appeared on a question-and-answer panel for design students, the theme of which was providing advice on ‘making it’ in the design world.

In that session, I heard from another of the panelists that, due to inexperience, newly minted designers should understand that their productivity will barely cover the cost of employing them. It was his belief that businesses who hire fresh graduates essentially sign up to provide a kind of on-the-job training — at a loss to the business. He didn’t put it in so many words, but the inference I made was that employment is a kind of favor bestowed by the company on new entrants to the job market.

What’s more, this person insisted that these freshly graduated professionals should be prepared to work for very little and for very long hours, that they should dedicate themselves to their work in tireless fashion, potentially at the expense of many other priorities in their lives.

I have a hard time with this advice, but for complicated reasons. It’s not that I think that the advice is not valid. On the contrary, I think this is an accurate reflection of the way the design industry ingests new talent. Rather, my quarrel is that I think this advice makes some unfortunate assumptions about what the quality of life within a design organization should be.

I’ve been in the Bay Area all week for work, and I’ve been meaning to post this news since Monday when I finally made my deadline: my forthcoming book “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design” is now officially complete and in the hands of my publisher, New Riders. According to the listing over at Amazon, it’ll ship in early December, so you can pre-order your copy today and have it in time for the holidays. At some booksellers the current pre-order price is over a third off of the cover price, plus if you buy it through any of these links, its humble author gets a little kickback: Amazon (US), Barnes & Noble or Borders.com.