Have you seen the new Adobe Creative Suite 3 icons? I wasn’t a fan of the previous set, but they didn’t drive me to Iconfactory. The new ones will.

(Via Chris Glass)

for Ramakwanzachanamas, let me just give you a hint: 12-inch, orange. The poor little guy needs to be reunited with his family!

(Via Awesome!)

On a more intellectual note (I like to keep the tone high around here, as you know), my friend Sarah G-P just redirected me to Eve Corbel’s Lesser-Known Editing and Proofreading Marks, which I’d seen before but forgotten.

I’m not very good with calendars. I used to get an engagement calendar each year but would write what had happened rather than what was supposed to happen. Now I use MacJournal for that. Then for a while the Palm Pilot calendar worked for me, beeping me to my appointments as long as I remembered to keep live batteries in it. I fell out of the habit of carrying a PDA, though, and at present I’m kept in line by Entourage at work, since I have to use it for e-mail anyway, and Google Calendar for personal dates. The only paper calendar in my life comes free from my college each year. I dutifully post it on the fridge and try to remember to turn the page every four weeks, give or take. I never write on it, as doing so would be a sure way of making me miss the event in question.

So the calendar whose corner is shown below, which the friendly and obviously brilliant W. Bradford Paley was giving away yesterday at a soiree I was lucky enough to attend, will be no more useless to me than most. I hope to find a wall for it in my new office.

I may even write something on it occasionally (very small, very neatly) and upload a photo of it, thus defaced, to the calendar’s discussion forum. Read the rest of this entry »

An editor just delivered to me a Starbucks gift card from the author of a book I haven’t even started working on yet. The author was late in returning the copyedited manuscript (or something—according to the schedule I have, nothing’s due until January) and actually felt guilty, knowing that combined with the holidays, this might send a cascade of hardship through the production department.

Awww.

Does Starbucks have sandwiches? (Being a tea drinker, I never go in there.) I could really use a sandwich right now.

Okay, so, you know how I’m always talking about pretty things you can make out of dead trees? Well, how would you feel if I kind of maybe mixed that up with some stuff about the pretty things you can make out of living, blinking pixels? Because as of January 15, 2007, I’ll no longer be designing book interiors full-time. Nope, instead, I’m switching gears—again!—to go manage this Web site. I’ll also be doing a bit of print-related stuff there, and, because I’m an idiot who doesn’t know how to say “No,” I’ll probably continue doing freelance work on print publications; but overall you should see a shift on this blog from print-related verbose rambling to Web-related verbose rambling. It’ll still be book-related, because I’ll be working at a literary organization with book right there in the name, but the nerdy parts may sound different.

(For those of you who’re amused by how-did-I-get-here stories, this latest transition was brought to you by two friends and former coworkers from the Academy of American Poets, who now work at Nextbook. There was some stuff that needed doing, and they thought I’d be a good person to come do it. There was lunch; there was tea; there was no interview-for-which- I-had-to-wear-grown-up-shoes. I feel guilty about leaving my current sweet gig so soon—I like it just fine and had intended to stay there at least five years—you know, until I was fully vested in the 401K—but the new gig is even sweeter, and I have friends and admired colleagues there already, and I dearly hope that I will like it even finer.)

So, if you have any outstanding questions about what it’s like to design book guts in house for a mainstream publisher, now’s your chance! Ask me before I forget everything!

And if you have any observations about Nextbook.org (which is about to be relaunched, with a redesign that I’ve had nothing to do with—exciting!), feel free to shoot them my way, either in comments or by e-mail. It’s been more than five years since I was responsible for a big-ass Web project, and it really would help me get up to speed with this new job to hear what some of you think of the existing site. I have my own vague opinions about it, and I’ve yet to thoroughly examine the redesign that’s still under wraps. But I don’t have any sense (much less hard data) yet of who visits the site, how they use it, and what they think of it. I’d love to hear your impressions, whether you’ve ever visited it before reading this post or not.

In other news, I’m on vacation. Hello, London! Any book nerds here? And Tuesday: Paris!