Do right by yourselves, people. If you need an insightful creative director, an insanely talented designer, and/or a talented, thoughtful developer, hire the hell out of him.

On a related note, I’ll be over here sobbing into my stylesheets if anyone needs me.

Dan Cederholm moves over to Wordpress, tweaking his site’s design as he does so. Which is lovely, of course, but not as lovely as this:

If anything, [the new design is] a slight step backward, to the layouts of SimpleBits’ past. Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.

I’ve been thinking the same thing lately: that this whole quasi-tumblelog thing I’ve been playing around with isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As Merlin Mann said: Jesus, I miss paragraphs.

In other words: OMG.

Read Jason’s launch announcement when you have a moment, and check out Dan Mall’s write-up as well. Congratulations, all!

Making something “free” is obviously an allocation strategy. “Free” attracts attention. Making things brief is an allocation strategy as well. The problem is that free isn’t sustainable, and that brief is underpriced.

We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.

(IOW, TLDR.)

Beautiful collection of stills taken from movie titles, categorized by decade. (Via Rumsey Taylor on Twitter.)

Stately-looking slab from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Be sure to check out the italic variant, too.

Now if you’ll kindly pardon me, I’m off to ask the cat to hide my wallet. Good day.

We so need more of this. Worked on any good non-fixed designs lately?

Be sure to check out Think Brownstone’s sketchnotes from AEA Seattle, too. Lovely stuff, and it makes me miss the show even more.

Wu-Tang album covers. Classic Blue Note art direction. Simply gorgeous. Be sure to check Logan’s Flickr account for the current and future entries.

Man, I can’t wait.

Hope to see you there.

(Note: ticket may not actually be golden.)