1. Lumberjack
2. Luthier
3. High School Wrestling Coach
4. River Guide
5. Sniper

1. “Passion sounds like a fancy word. I like what I do.” — Cormac McCarthy
2. “You can nail your 95 theses to the door once you own one.” — Matt Chandler
3. “[Just] because you signed up to a non-profit doesn’t give you a license to be lazy and uninteresting.” — Jack Welch
4. “Design mimics the bureaucracy it was created in.” — Edward Tufte
5. “If you can be yourself on stage nobody else can be you and you have the law of supply and demand covered.” — Bill Hicks

1. They use words like “disparate” in normal everyday conversation.
2. There is a huge amount of good graphic design here.
3. Most everyone has great legs. (You would too if you walked as much as they do.)
4. Rush hour on the subway pushes the boundaries of how many people you think it’s possible to stuff into one rail car. What’s that in my armpit? Oh, it’s seven other people.
5. The fashion styles in the city can basically be divided into four categories: just right fashionable, way too many accessories fashionable, I don’t care about how I look, and tourist.

1. “Do a minimum of products, well.” — Dave Harris
2. “Policies are an admission that you have failed to lead.” — Shawn Wood
3. “Google gives you the ability to get inside people’s minds via what they’re searching for.” — Bobby Gruenwald
4. “As a designer, I feel most comfortable with constraints. I like to be swaddled.” — Nathan Smith
5. “A dream has very specific outcomes attached to it. Dreams can make us do hurtful things.” — Phil Vischer

1. We shop online. We buy most of our vitamins and home care stuff on Vitacost. Great prices, and $4.99 flat shipping. I really dig AmericanApparel’s Tri-Blend Track Shirts, but they run $22 in the store. Or $10 on Amazon.com. Whatever you want, you can likely find online for cheaper. Stop paying everyone’s overhead for their physical stores.

2. We use Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap. We dig the peppermint. It replaced soap, shampoo, conditioner, body wash, etc. for me (and Mrs. Blankenship.) Huge savings, and less of me knocking 20 bottles of random concoctions off the shelves every time I shower.

3. We have a Sam’s Club membership. Pick your poison (Sam’s, Costco, etc.), but we made back the cost of our membership the first time we bought toilet paper. We don’t buy a lot in bulk, but the warehouse retail places are great for larger kitchen items like olive oil that’ll run big bucks in the grocery store.

4. Speaking of which, we cook at home. Don’t know how to? Neither did we. After two years all our friends think we hung the moon when they eat at our house. It’s simple, go to the library (free!) and checkout some cookbooks. Follow the instructions. Repeat until you dominate all things culinary. Bonus: it’s healthier, too.

5. We dry our razors off after we use them. Razors get dull from use eventually, but most of the time they just get dull because they’re left wet and the blade oxidizes (e.g. rusts). I use Mach3 blades, shave well once or twice a week, and I haven’t bought a new box of blades since I lived in Dallas. In 2007.

1. Handmade, custom-painted axes* from Best Made Co.
2. The gorgeous PF Bodoni Script Pro typeface family
3. Shrimp, a handy URL shortener for ExpressionEngine from Dan Benjamin
4. Brand New’s Why Do You Sketch Logos? article (and comments)
5. The Facebook username countdown

*I have a birthday coming up this month. The Flashman or Jim Dandy will do.

1. The aforementioned 30th birthday
2. The Spooners move to The SC
3. My nephew Bear turns 5
4. The Armstrong Family Circus stops by our casa for a few days
5. Anywhere from 0—5 site designs I’ve been working on for clients go live

1. This one
2. Or this one
3. This one, too
4. And this one
5. Also, this one

1. My iPhone is not in any way connected with AT&T
2. My iPhone projects movies on the wall and connects to speakers via Airport
3. My iPhone remotely unlocks my house
4. My iPhone is a flying car
5. My iPhone pays off my student loans

1. Cheese
2. Printers
3. Dress Shoes
4. Hitmen
5. Kitchen Knives

1. Preparing for Mrs. Blankenship‘s return (in other words, house projects)
2. Preparing for this weekend’s final interview with a potential web dev for NewSpring
3. Finishing this drawing
4. Finishing some HUGE Prom Night Fist Fight style vinyl wall graphics
5. Trying, and failing, to keep up with email

1. John Romita Jr. era Daredevil
2. Gustav Doré
3. Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body
4. Shinobi
5. Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations in Stephen King’s The Stand

1. Endlessly curating the Museum of Macro Flower Photography
2. Your wardrobe only consists of too-short t-shirts
3. Your wardrobe only consists of Too $hort t-shirts
4. Cubicles
5. Your car stereo plays Vitas non-stop

1. Being gifted a Paul McCobb coffee table
2. Driving Zac’s Audi, sunroof open, on long, curvy country roads
3. Finally finishing The West Wing, which we started watching in Boston in July of ’07
4. Watching some of the NCAA Wrestling National Championships
5. Hearing Iowa wrestler Brent Metcalf respond to an interviewer’s statement “Your opponent was content to sit back…” with “My opponent was content to lose by three points.”

1. Slept for 12 hours
2. Perused faithful reader Danielle Hartland’s notes from our comm/web strategy breakout
3. Watched Reality Bites, an episode of Heroes, and a hat trick of The West Wing
4. Read through Ken Wilson‘s notes from his video/motion graphics breakout
5. Agreed to teach at the Dirt Conference in November

1. Ben Harper
2. Slayer
3. Guster
4. Ben Folds
5. Iron & Wine

1. The Unleash Conference day-of website
2. A long overdue blog design for Perry Noble
3. A complete identity rollout for J. Windsor’s Salon
4. A blog redesign for WordPress guru Nathan Rice
5. An online home for Mrs. Blankenship

Bonus: Furniture, fixtures, and layout for my team’s new workspace, affectionately dubbed The Taj Mahawesome

1. Noah Stokes
2. Joshua Longbrake
3. Chris Glass
4. Jim Renaud
5. Phil Coffman

1. Consistency in the little details begets consistency in the overall impact.
2. Wayfinding arrows should never point to the text.
3. Sweat the kerning on your type, or it’ll eventually drive you crazy when it’s physical.
4. Scale matters, especially with signage, so do your homework.
5. Design is more about thought process than implementation. Think before you computer.

1. You can make it pretty as pretty can be, but if it doesn’t work or people can’t use it, you lose.
2. Don’t hire until it hurts; you can do more than you think you can.
3. Don’t overdo it; dedicated time for fun-having makes work time better.
4. Hard seasons separate the hirelings from the People Who Get It.
5. Working out consistently is amazing, and well worth the sleep and money traded for it.

1. Jazz Impressions Of New York – The Dave Brubeck Quartet
2. Hold Time – M. Ward
3. Swordfish Trombones – Tom Waits
4. The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion – The Black Crowes
5. Noble Beast – Andrew Bird