In part to prove Steve Jobs wrong, I quietly resolved to myself earlier this year that I would read a book a month, but I’m already way behind. The problem is that for book number one I chose “Conversations with Woody Allen” by Eric Lax, a thoroughly engrossing compendium of Lax’s many interviews with the filmmaker over the past three-plus decades.

In theory, it should have been an easy book to polish off for January, because it reads quite breezily. The thing is its subject matter has naturally spurred me to spend much of the time that I should be reading book number two instead watching as many of Allen’s movies as I can. In case you lost count back in the nineties, there are now over thirty-five of them. Gulp. Before I read this book I think I’d seen about twenty of them, but now I want to watch all of the ones I’ve missed — and watch those twenty again, too. Time consuming.

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This comes as a surprise to me, but a look at most all of the icons on my computer reveals that the vast majority of them are blue. There’s only a very small handful — Adium, Address Book, iCal, Transmit, some others — that aren’t. Blue, blue, blue — everywhere I look all over my hard drive, blue.

Maybe this is old news to you — it’s hardly novel for any Westerner to realize that, if there’s a default color that signals acceptability and inoffensiveness, it᾿s blue. But if you don’t believe me, have a look at these thirty icons I collected from my hard drive (please, no potshots about how out of date some of them are. I’m too busy to upgrade) and how shockingly uniform they are in color.

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The graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister is now a kind of phenomenon. In recent months, he’s released a second book, mounted a solo exhibition at the renowned gallery Deitch Projects, and made a splash at Art Basel. And these are just the latest achievements in a career brimming with landmark design solutions and attendant accolades.

All of which has been well-earned. His work is often breathtakingly ambitious in its understanding of what design can be. It takes a certain kind of ingenuity and clarity of vision to intuit that this profession can mean typography carved into human flesh, or charts and graphics rendered huge and inflatable, or hanging out the side of the Empire State Building.

What’s more, his work also possesses a unique sense of whimsy that’s typically scarce in graphic design. Whether it’s a wall bricked with hundreds of bananas or a two actual school buses stacked one on top of the other, there’s a healthy amount of pure mirth present in most of his solutions — you rarely get the idea that he’s weary of his assignments, or that he’s doing anything less than having the time of his life. Indeed, one of the things that makes it so genuinely engaging is that Sagmeister seems to possesses an indefatigable willingness to act upon his playful ideas, to go to whatever lengths necessary to turn them into reality. Contrast that alacrity with the resignation of those of us who, if we can’t conjure up a solution in software or within ten feet of our desks, rule out anything more ambitious entirely. (Guilty as charged.)

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I’m not much for this holiday, really. It’s kind of hard to get enthusiastic about it when you’re not dating anyone, as happens to be the case with me at the moment. In spite of that convenient pessimism, I have two Valentine’s Day-related bits to share with you, both of which also happen to be A Brief Message-related.

First is today’s adorable new Message, written by Esther K. Smith about giving pink hearts a chance, embracing cliché and reliving the abandon of grade school arts and crafts. This one was illustrated — also adorably — by Clément Fabre. Don’t be afraid — go read it.

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Digital evangelists: if you have any doubt about the convincing power of print, then order yourself a book of your own making over at Lulu.com — remember to put your name prominently on the cover — and show it around to your friends. That’s what I did for a project I’m working on with Steven Heller; I wrote and designed a ten-page spread (illustrated by my good friend, the incomparably hilarious Olso Davis) and created a PDF in which the pages are repeated over and over again about fifteen times, then sent it off to Lulu.com for a single hardcopy.

The effect I was going for was a kind of bookish trompe l’oeil in which I create the impression of a real, full-length book. But more on that when the project actually comes to fruition.

In the meantime, I’m very pleasantly surprised and delighted by my first experiment with Lulu.com. I just got the end product in the mail last week, and when I opened it up I saw it was really just a bunch of laser prints hardbound together — nevertheless, it’s convincing as heck. When I show it to friends and colleagues, their eyes light up with amazement at my name on the cover. I mean, it stops people in their tracks. Sadly, Web sites don’t do that.

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The much hyped One Laptop per Child project makes me sad. I ordered one of these promising, kid-friendly portable computers last November, during the very first week it became available for domestic customers under its foundation’s “Give One, Get One” program. For US$400, not only would I get an XO Laptop, but I’d also be be effectively buying one for a needy child in a developing nation.

But my XO never arrived. I waited and waited, and it never arrived. And then it became apparent to me that good intentions and great publicity don’t necessarily equal great customer service. When I went looking for my laptop, I discovered that the OLPC foundation’s ability to track, update and ship my laptop to me is barely better than that of a home mail order business. Last I heard from them, they assured me I would get mine “delivered in 45 to 60 days.”

Now I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the laptop altogether, especially given the generally poor reviews that the device’s operating system and interface have garnered. So I called them this week to cancel the part of my order that would buy a laptop for me — I didn’t have the heart to ask for a refund on the half that was ostensibly destined for some poor Third World child. Even that, they couldn’t get right; the operator on the phone could only refund an unspecified “fair market value” price, for some obscure reason. It felt like bureaucracy, to me. Sadly.

How long has it been since I’ve had my iPhone? Less than a year, but it feels like it’s been a decade when I look back at my old Palm Treo 650. I pulled it out of a box this evening with the plan of sending it off to Cell Phones for Soldiers, and was shocked by how bulky and archaic it seems.

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Super Tuesday starts in five minutes. Twenty-four states of primary action. Woo hoo! I just want to remind people voting in those states to bring along your cameras to take snapshots for The Polling Place Photograph Project, a collaboration between my employer, The New York Times, AIGA and Bill Drenttel. Snap a shot of your polling place and help us document democracy in action.

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, as you’ve no doubt heard by now. To my mind, it’s a terrible idea to combine two foundering behemoths in an attempt at besting an even bigger behemoth like Google (and moreover to do so with only enough ambition to shoot for being number two). But the point, I think, is that Yahoo has failed. The company flew high for much of its life, but it would surprise no one to say that it’s been in trouble for some time.

Why is Yahoo in this position? I won’t pretend to have all the answers to that question, but I can say one thing: design apparently had nothing to do with it.

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Yikes. Just now, I spent over US$600 on new typefaces. Well, not really. Mentally, I did, because I just quickly tallied up all of the typefaces I’ve seen recently and wished that I owned.

I’ll do that from time to time; window shopping, as it were, for new fonts to add to my repertoire, though I’ll rarely indulge myself by actually buying them. It’ll come as no surprise to most folks that, more often than not, I’ll fall back on Helvetica.

Still, I do have some desire to broaden my horizons. It’s just rare that I’ll find new typefaces that strike me as compelling enough to buy. The problem isn’t that I find recent typographic design lacking. Rather, it’s that I just don’t often find new typefaces that I feel are a good match for my particular ‘design voice’ (say what you will about the relative distinctiveness — or lack thereof — to be found in Helvetica, but it helps me say what I want). I draw a parallel between finding the right typefaces for my repertoire and putting together a wardrobe: there are plenty of clothes that I see worn by other people to smashing effect, but it’s not every style that I feel would look good on me.

That said, here are a few of the ones that I threw into my mental shopping cart.

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