Not those books: these books. The brilliant Michael Lopp’s extensive ruminations on the perfect notebook may seem odd to some, but to people who still can’t get through a day without jotting down their thoughts, it’s an excellent piece:

The primary goal of a notebook is to get out of the way… to disappear. It does this by perfectly fitting into your writing situation. How accessible does it need to be? What notebook tangibles do you need? How will it withstand a beating? By fitting into how you write, a notebook becomes invisible. It wastes none of your time because any moment you spend noticing the notebook is a moment you could be noticing something else, and writing about it.

But that’s not what makes a notebook truly sexy.

I have years of experience with some notebooks, weeks with others. As you can see, I’ve explored a wide variety of notebooks. The photo above is ordered chronologically, with my oldest journal on the bottom and my newest discovery, the Field Notes brand, the notebook in which I’m writing the first draft of this article, on the top. Like The Gel Dilemma, I’ve evaluated notebooks according to specific buckets of criteria.

He proceeds to evaluate the different brands, based on a variety of factors. I agree that paper weight is the Achilles heel of the Moleskine brand, thought the Cahier pocket size is quite durable in my experience, and is the notebook I’ve used the most simply because it’s inexpensive and easily replaced if you drop it somewhere or spill coffee on it.

My problem with notebooks is that they don’t have quality paper. But that creates another problem: the ones that do, such as a nice notebook I bought in college from Cavallini & Co., are just too nice to actually use. I feel guilty, like it’s bad to mix up the To Do list and callback numbers with random thoughts that will turn into unsuccessful proposals or unimportant blog posts across paper that is at least 90# stock. Thus, the nicest notebook I own - a handmade leather bound embossed hardback I got from London, which looks like it should contain lengthy discourse on Thucydides or at least a good poem or two - is still unused. It sits on my desk in its wrapping, mocking me on a daily basis with its tobacco colored spine. I’ve had it for almost five years, and it is waiting for me to write in it.

But until the inspiration comes, I’ll stick to the best new find I’ve made, via Rands in Repose and Coudal Partners (otherwise known as the creators of Layer Tennis and Jewelboxing) - the solid, confident, and perfectly sized Field Notes.

The leatherbound goddess will have to wait.

This week, there were more than nine thousand Diggs for this Youtube Vid, “Why every guy should buy their girlfriend a Wii Fit.” The vid itself has over 780,000 views at the time of this posting, and no wonder, since it primarily consists of a t-shirt-and-underwear clad girl gyrating in time with the Wii Fit’s hula hoop game.

It’s a simple construction: sex sells. And I’m sure that any boyfriend would be proud to post this. Except that, on further inspection, this looks like it’s just another viral ad - albeit a somewhat edgy one for otherwise child-friendly Nintendo. Shoemoney lays it all out:

The first clue to me was the username on YouTube: tinsleyadvertising

Then a quick search on the Tinsley Advertising site lead me to the employee page where I found 1 guy who looked very similar to the guy in the video. His name is Giovanny Gutierrez.

From Gio’s Bio:

Giovanny Gutierrez
Director of Interactive Media

Gio comes from the future. He is perfectly versed in most programming languages, dreams in code and can’t sleep when his pixels aren’t in order.

As Tinsley’s Director of Interactive Media, he creates web, e-mail and interactive marketing solutions that perfectly integrate with television, radio and print campaigns. Gio is a master of e-commerce, having created web portals for scores of businesses. He was founder and creative director of web-design firm Ionic Studios, teaches digital web programming at Miami-Dade College, is a certified Macromedia Developer, an Apple Certified System Administrator and a Certified Internet Webmaster. He’s also won numerous awards and accolades in the web design circuit.

Gio will be your point man on anything even remotely futuristic. Be nice to him or he will hack into your bank account.

Then doing a quick search on flickr with those tags we come across some interesting photos also tagged as tinsley which also give us clues as to who the girl is in the video. It appears to be another tinsley employee named Lauren Bernat.

If you want to see photos of Lauren and Gio fooling around at what looks like an office outing, head on over there. What is the internet coming to if you can’t even believe that a hugely popular web video with a gyrating female is honest and sincere, instead of some devious capitalist plan?

Christine has the Wii Fit in DC right now, or we could try a more honest substitute.

Update: The Consumerist is all over this.

This little icanhas-friendly banner was inspired by the announcement yesterday by the McCain campaign that you can create, for a mere $250, a banner expressing your unique satisfaction with John McCain. I’m not sure what to say to this idea, but it reminded me about how aesthetically unappealing presidential campaigns tend to become - their logos the product of hours of debate and committees populated by people who’ve never designed anything worth emailing.

If you want a sign of how conventional politics is, and how the innovation of the Obama campaign really is finally catching up a national campaign with the design trends of the ’90s, check out this collection of presidential bumper stickers, 1960-2008. I particularly love how Fred Thompson’s sticker is crowded, illegible, and the color of prune juice, as if designed for the Law & Order-watching retirement communities of Florida in which he put so much hope.

The best part of any designed branding, though, has to do with the font choice of a campaign. Ah, these are some doozies. And 2008 is no exception - as one of my favorite typography blogs Ask H&FJ recently pointed out. The originators of the Gotham font so famously used by The New Adonis, they even mocked up graphics with the Hillary and McCain fonts in their proper place:

Nor were these designers alone in their fascination with these choices. The New York Times hosted a roundtable on McCain’s font, the overused 90s relic Optima (which nonetheless still has some gravitas, since it’s the font displaying the names of so many heroes on the Vietnam Memorial). The descriptions can get a little silly, but there’s truth in this ridiculousness:

While it is not the most robust sans serif ever designed, it is not entirely neutral either. It embodies and signifies a certain spirit and attitude. And if a typeface is not just an empty vessel for meaning, but a signifier that underscores personality, then it is useful in understanding what the candidates’ respective typefaces are saying about them and their campaigns.

The designers questioned have some interesting thoughts - some like the selection, most hate it, but many concede that it’s a choice that has a good deal in common with McCain’s personality. The newest entry in the presidential stakes, Libertarian Bob Barr, has a font that seems like a solid midwestern pro-American creation, suitable for a beer can or a local sports bar - neither of which, I think, would meet the approval of the Prohibitionist candidate for President (yes, there still are those). Chuck Baldwin, the televangelist Constitution Party candidate, has a logo that looks as if it should grace a can of Play Doh or silly putty. Over at the Green Party, the colorful logo of Cynthia McKinney pits an offkilter insurgency against a staid old Nader logo that looks not unlike his original presentation more than a decade ago. It’s honest, at least - even his logo looks like dried-up ’80s-era socialism.

Asking whether this odd grabbag of out-of-touch designs are any more a sign of what lies within each candidate than Obama’s famous O logo illustrates how foolhardy this talk is: football players don’t pick their NFL team based on the logos on the helmet, or pick a sport based on whether they want to wear Nike, Reebok or adidas. All that Obama’s campaign has done is recognize that they should start abiding by the rules of a different game - not the tired old design choices of prior candidates, with the same color arcs and blocky typefaces, but with the attitude of tried and true corporate ad agencies. Sell a candidate like you’d sell a good pair of shoes, and the same people tend to listen and react.

Of course, if you want to see real font-leveraging in action, you have to go back to the good old days, when things were cool and slick. Yes, the glory days, before everything had to be grungy and worn-in: the 1980s. Watch this first. Read this second.

The digs here have changed, as you might have noticed. Improved even. This should not be considered in any way as a sign that the writing will follow suit.

>> Sometimes, it’s easy to forget about who the true heroes are. Yes: they’re the people who create bacon salt, the zero calorie, vegetarian, kosher seasoning salt that makes everything taste like bacon. And they have a blog.

I love America. And also xkcd. (h/t Christine)

>> An extremely accurate piece on why web advertising so often = fail. Scott Karp writes: “We need to invent new forms of advertising on the web. But it’s more than that. Facebook introduced Beacon as a new form of advertising — but it didn’t create a lot of value for users. Online advertising must create value for users or it will create little or no value for advertisers. This would seem self-evident, but it has not been the case with traditional advertising, which was developed for CAPTIVE audiences, and web users are increasingly anything but captive.” (h/t Ruffini’s FriendFeed)

>> Only in California.  Only at the LA Times. The text: “Times Poll: Californians narrowly reject gay marriage” - By bare majorities, Californians reject the state Supreme Court’s decision to allow same-sex marriages and back a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at the November ballot that would outlaw such unions, a Los Angeles Times/KTLA Poll has found.” Four paragraphs before you get to the numbers: “Either way, the poll suggests the outcome of the proposed amendment is far from certain. Overall, it was leading 54% to 35% among registered voters.” Yep, 19 point margin = barely there. One wonders what they would’ve said if it had the same margin in the other direction.

>> The Washington Times redesign has several interesting elements. You can see them all in a slideshow, posted here. Count me a big fan of the new Sunday edition in particular.

>> Emily Blount of Gawker bares all in her new article over at the NYTimes magazine. I wish I felt differently about this, but the question I have to ask is: why does the internet horde produce such similar reactions, regardless of the point or purpose of the blog in question? I think this is just another example that the Green Blackboards effect is all-encompassing, regardless of topic area. (h/t Trevino’s FriendFeed)