(originally posted on Twitter)

When my parents made the switch to a plasma TV, ditched their old bulky six foot tall cherry TV cabinet, replacing it with a cute little table.

But what to do about those nasty cables hanging out the back?

My ever inventive dad found a thin board, painted it the same color as the wall, and nailed it to the back of the table. The back crossbar, conveniently positioned at the top of the white baseboard trim, hides the seam. The cables and the board are completely invisible, from almost anywhere in the room.

Think he could get a job at Apple?

This is an impressive piece of email communication from the White House.

The email aims to debunk myths about the U.S. health care reform bill by explicitly co-opting the format in which these myths are disseminated: a forward-friendly email of memorable bullet points. This brilliant choice allowed them to cram a lot of information about a complex, emotional, scary topic into something digestible.

They’ve also managed to nail a bunch of other great practices for email newsletter writing:

• Sincere, approachable, jargon-free writing style
• Sets clear expectations of length, structure and content early on (4th paragraph)
• Groups ideas under subheadings.
• One idea per paragraph
• Short paragraphs
• Moderate, consistent link density
• Restrained use of graphics

My only gripe with it is consistency. The section titled “8 common myths about health insurance reform” mixes restatement (e.g. “We can’t afford reform”) and refutation (e.g. “Vets’ health care is safe and sound”), effectively reinforcing the myths, weakening the refutations or both for less careful readers.

Ever since The 4-Hour Workweek, I’ve been hearing a lot about the wisdom in working smart rather than working hard. I work quite a lot, smart enough I think, but with plenty of mistakes as well. What bothers me about the “work smart, not hard” mantra is that it implies that hard work is necessarily an undesirable weakness to be overcome or cured.

I have a few responses.

1. Sometimes you need to work hard, even when you are working smart.

Creative work rarely goes from good to great without some hard work. This doesn’t mean that every job needs to take 500 hours, but some just do. And the ones that only take 5 minutes often take only 5 minutes because you’ve worked hard at similar tasks years ago and now they come easy.

There are plenty of other legitimate reasons to work hard, even when you’re working smart: your partner is out sick, you made a mistake, someone else made a mistake, you’re on a roll, etc.

2. Who wants a 4-hour work week?

I have no interest in a 4-hour work week, I love my job. I work in a comfortable office with people I respect and care about, doing projects which are enjoyable.

If the idea of a 4-hour work week is attractive to you, you’ll probably have better luck at happiness by looking for a better job or looking to make your current job more enjoyable than by searching for a way to get rich quick, get other people to do your work for you, or whatever other snake oil this book is selling.

(It seems like the easiest way to achieve the 4-hour work week is to write a book about the 4-hour work week. Except that someone already did that.)

3. Working smart is not a bad idea.

Of course it’s not. But it does mean different things to different people and professions. For me?

• Regularly asking myself if I’m going in the right direction and knowing when to start over and when it’s time to push further
• Knowing when good enough is good enough and when it isn’t. (* story on inside of box)
• Knowing when shortcuts are going to end up taking me longer to fix than doing things the right way from the beginning
• Knowing when asking others for help will save time and when it will cost time
• Knowing when doing something today will take half the effort it will take tomorrow, and when it will take twice

I learned (and am learning) most of this stuff through experience gained while working hard, as most people probably do.

Hard work is not necessarily a virtue and certainly not for everyone, but some people (myself included) enjoy it. We may change our mind someday, but in the meantime, skip the lecture and let us get back to work!

—

* In my college summers, I used to work light construction with my father and uncle. One morning my uncle gave me a tiny closet to paint, and left me be.

He came back a few hours later to check up, shocked to find me still in the closet, sweatily struggling to get the paint strokes to all go in the same direction. He boasted about how he and my dad used to compete for who could get more apartments painted before lunchtime, and then he told me my closet was fine as is.

I protested and pointed to the uneven brush marks, when he smiled as his eyebrows arched upwards.

“I have just the thing to fix that.”

Then he reached up and pulled the little string hanging from the light bulb in the ceiling and the closet went dark.

Since it might be a while before we get to a full writeup of the ASICS EU redesign, I thought I might share a few little points of happiness we found along the way:

A Problem:
We decide to bring the country selector down to the bottom of the page, to save valuable real estate up top. If you have a long list of countries, the typical dropdown list will make the page get longer, and when the user scrolls to find their country, the dropdown closes back up again, essentially making it unusable.

A Solution:
Make the drop down drop up, with a little bit of Craig’s Javascript magic. Page doesn’t get longer or scroll, and the entire list is visible and clickable.

Try it out!

Don’t worry, I won’t make this a habit.

• For now, it’s keeping up nicely, only ever feels sluggish when Parallels is booting up or shutting down.
• Runs Photoshop like a dream. I now know that the remaining annoyance, chokes on “Save for Web”, are CS’s fault and not my Mac’s.
• I was on 10.4 on my last machine, so I’m happy to have a version of spotlight that works.
• The keyboard is nice, but the key’s, especially the space bar, are less firm and noisier than the Apple keyboard.
• The no-button takes too much pressure for a click. For the first time, I moved to tapping, which is error prone, but less tiresome.
• The screen is nice and bright, maybe too much so. Slight differences in very light greys are lost. Maybe this is more in line with other laptops and will keep me away from design nuances that will be lost for most users, but even that unintended benefit is probably a job for CS color profiles.
• The NVIDIA 9600M GT graphics processor (the lesser of the two) is a P.O.S. When it’s running, I get random flickers of black, and YouTube videos choke, usually at the moment of truth. Also, when you dim the screen down to the last few bars, it flickers like a dying florescent. If running this processor gave the machine 15 hours of battery life then fine, but it doesn’t, why would you install something so crappy in something called “Pro”?
• The screen hinge is already too loose after 3 months.
• The nasty key prints are even more of an eyesore on the glossy screen. This seems like something that should have been easy to avoid.

I just posted some photos from our trip to Seto Inland Sea from a few months ago.

AQ is designing a website for the Setouchi Art Festival, set for the summer and fall of 2010. A quick rundown of the who/what/when/why over on our blog.

This essay on the ethics of moonlighting designers seems to be making the rounds, and strikes me as completely ignorant of how reputations are built in the web industry.

Full disclosure, I’m a friend and ex-colleague of Luke Wroblewski, a designer at Yahoo whom the author uses as an example of a well-respected web professional, whose personal design consultancy “makes him look flighty and unprofessional” and “makes both his consultancy and Yahoo!’s design practice look a bit dodgy”.

On the contrary, I bet that the existence and maintenance of that very site is part of why Yahoo decided he was right for the job in the first place. The work and thinking contained within the site shows that Luke is aggressive, independent, well-rounded and engaged with the outside world, all qualities I look for and admire in AQ’s small staff. Likewise, as a prospective client of Luke’s, his position at Yahoo combined with his lukew.com presence would give me a pretty good idea of the type and caliber of design problems he’s capable of addressing.

More than ever, people in general create multiple online identities as a way to make themselves easy to find, give the world a more complete understanding of who they are, and attract and maintain interest in what they’re doing. While the writing style of lukew.com may be a bit more corporate than it needs to be, the site essentially acts as one these identities for Luke, and I, for one, am glad that he continues to maintain it. I imagine his employer is too.

I’m going to be hosting the next TAB Talks, featuring a presentation and Q&A with type designer Christian Schwartz. Christian has created custom typefaces for publications and companies like Esquire, Wallpaper*, The New York Times, Bosch and Deutsche Bahn. His typefaces for the Guardian were an integral part of the newspaper’s acclaimed redesign in 2005.

The talk will be held in English with Japanese translation, at Gotanda Sonic in Gotanda. Hope to see you there!

Stag is available for purchase at Village

Late March/Early April promises to be a good time for art and design fans, with major auctions, awards, exhibitions and festivals happening throughout the city.

In January, we started working on a handful of related projects with TAB and Marunouchi to get ready for their respective contributions to the celebration. This week, we finally have something out in the open to show for it, a one-pager for Marunouchi Art Weeks, an umbrella for all the Marunouchi-area art events happening this season. There’s much more still at the printers, but I couldn’t wait to share the link.