You should have stickers and/or Cadence & Slang Mini by now. If you don't, email me at nickd at nickd dot org. So far only one person has expressed shipping issues, which is a pretty amazing proportion. Fingers crossed that it stays that way when I mail books.

Writing is now done for every section. In nerd terms, this means the book is feature complete, but not bug-fixed. I have the next several months to clean up the writing, fire drafts off to friends, finesse the whole thing, work with my illustrator to develop pretty doodles, and make some doodles of my own.

On the last point: it's easy to spend 37,000 words discussing interaction design (and yes, that's where we're at right now), but it's much easier to express those ideas pictorially. I'm ahead of time a little, and want to find novel ways to deal with this. It makes more sense, especially given how I've laid out the book, to establish its own internal visual grammar. Every operating system has its own way to visually express a form pull-down, for instance, and countless more ways exist to wireframe it. At the same time, the instant you use any elements from any real-world operating system, the book dates itself. But I want to express these conventions, and familiarity is on my side: after 20 years of stagnant GUI design, everyone on Earth knows what a checkbox is.

Other books have been successful with this. For example, the influential books of Edward Tufte have dozens of graphs that are near-uniformly set in Gill Sans, with the same color palette. And while I have no interest in comparing C&S to Visual Display, the concept makes sense, especially considering both books concern themselves with cleaning up current work to some degree.

So I'm thinking of trying my hand at Adobe Illustrator over the coming weeks, and seeing what happens. I can already sketch well, and wireframing looks decent, but we'll see how well I work with vector graphics for the first time. I'm super adept at Photoshop, but Illustrator... not so much. This is all a long way of saying: if you have any decent tips or resources for learning Illustrator fast and correctly (I'm acutely sensitive to there being a right way and a dumb way in Adobe products), dump them in the comments.

I'm going to SXSW Interactive, and need a place to crash. I'm weighing my options, but if you have a decent place near downtown or want to split a hotel room, let me know.