You know the drill. A hundred jokes begin that way. "Guy walks into a bar...”

How many of those jokes end with the guy moving into the bar and setting up his own business?

That's exactly what happened in Sacramento, California last week. A homeless man broke into a defunct bar and reopened it, beginning by selling a six pack of beer he bought from a local liquor store. Like a true entrepreneur, he went back to the store, reinvested the profits into more beer and set up shop. Days later, he was serving over thirty customers and by all accounts, set up a pretty good, albeit illegal, business for himself. 

The bar was so successful it received a write up in the local paper, prompting the sheriff's office to inquire if the establishment obtained a liquor license. Upon investigation, they discovered a considerable amount of cash and alcohol. Police arrested the homeless man, one Travis Kevie, charging him with burglary and selling liquor without a license.

Business consultants constantly tout the virtues of thinking out of the box when times are tough, and here is a guy who did just that. Instead of panhandling he came up with an audacious plan, implemented it, and made a successful go of it (for a limited time). 

I'm not about to condone breaking and entering, or flouting the law, but there's a lesson to be learned here. In this tough economic times, we keep talking about how we need to approach things differently and come up with new paradigms for business.

Travis Kevie did exactly that. He saw opportunity and took advantage, setting up the adult version of a childhood lemonade stand.

What rules (rules, not laws) could you break that would expand your market? If failing did not matter to you, could you be bold enough to undertake something truly transformational?

An intriguing, if light hearted article from the BBC on the importance, or lack thereof, of typefaces.

As someone who has obsessed over the merits of Univers over Helvetica Neu (we opted for Helvetica Neu; the letterforms have more character, particularly the T), I enjoyed reading about the collective sniping in the design community.

It's been a brutal time for print publications. Newspapers are either dying outright, or morphing into the obscene infotainment formats that USA Today spawned years ago. When I moved to Chicago in 1992, one of the great diversions of the day was reading the Chicago Tribune over lunch. You literally could not read all of it in a sitting, it was so rich with content.

Look at it now, and you can read it from cover to cover in 15 minutes. That's if you can bear the cheesy infographics and trash stories that predominate (Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, etc.). The Tribune is obviously not alone in this. Other newspapers and magazines have suffered, their bottom lines crippled by the loss of advertising revenue and competing publications online. The Chicken Littles have been crying that the sky is falling and there has been little to refute that prognostication.

One publication has thrived, however, by zigging while everyone else has zagged.

The Economist, the bastion of incisive global commentary and reporting, has bloomed. Sales and ad revenue are at all time highs, with no loss in quality of reporting or printing.

How have they managed to do so?

By standing by their convictions and doing what they do best; offering what readers have come to expect and value. They deliver deep, in-depth reports and analysis to their core niche audience, eschewing trends and the quick, easy news of the moment. 

They recently updated their online magazine, continuing this model of well-written content, in a well-designed, no fluff website. It's a deceptively clean redesign, providing a broad range of easily navigable content in an elegant format.

While other publications, both print and online, have denigrated into offering the news equivalent of the one-night stand, The Economist is still a worthwhile relationship, one that rewards careful reading and evaluation.

It's an apt metaphor for how designers and consultants position our services, particularly in this challenging economy. We can base our efforts on price, in which case both we and our clients lose. There will always be someone cheaper, and once we begin basing our services solely on cost, we lose any possibility of the relationship, instead fulfilling a transaction. It's rare that a reduction in fees does not also result in a reduction in deliverables, leaving the client feeling that they got less than they deserve.

Crowdsourcing, speculative work, and hack creative agencies will always be a fact of life in our profession. We can either play that game, in which case we will always lose, or change the playing field outright by continuing to deliver premium work, and educate clients about the value of our services.

One of my favorite afternoon past times is browsing through used book stores. Fortunately, there is one around the corner from me, which helps facilitate this spontaneous idleness. Used book stores are a hit and miss affair. They can have stacks of nothing or you can walk out spending a hundred dollars on a yard of books. In an age of the instant gratification and purchase on Amazon, I suppose this is a large part of their appeal.

Recently, I hit the motherlode. My corner store had a stack of Nabokov books, all of which I have been meaning to read. Nabokov is a bit like Kerouac. Everyone has read Kerouac's On the Road or Nabokov's Lolita. However, most of their other titles are largely ignored by the reading public. That's probably a wise move with Kerouac, but Nabokov's catalog is well worth exploring in depth and it has been on my literary to-do list for years.

So with this treasure trove of books that I've been coveting, what do I do?

Walk away without making a single purchase. 

The reason? They were the wrong covers. 

I'm hopelessly obsessive about making sure any book I buy has the best cover design for that given title. Vintage Books recently commissioned designer John Gall to redesign the entire Nabokov series of books. The result is a magnificent series of covers, created by multiple designers based around a single theme: a specimen box. Vladimir Nabokov was an avid butterfly collector, and the image of the specimen box forms the visual axis around which the series revolves.

The above example is Paul Sahre's contribution. Twenty-one designers submitted designs based around this construct, the results of which you can see here in their entirety.

Designers as a rule tend to do their best work when given a specific and narrow range of parameters. Give us a white slate with unlimited options, and we tend to be a bit paralyzed with indecision. Provide a focused set of objectives within a specific set of parameters, and we are bound to defy expectation. The Vintage covers does a good job of illustrating this literally and metaphorically.

It's always instructive to reread the Declaration of Independence, as much for the poetry and potency of the language as for its assertion of our rights as a nation. I got in the habit of reading it every Independence Day some years back and it never fails to leave an impression.

The oft-quoted Preamble contains one of the most famous sentences ever written, asserting "the right of revolution". In effect, it says that people have certain rights and when the government violates those rights they are entitled and have the duty to alter or abolish that government.

The latter part of the document is a list of grievances against King George and England, reading like one of the most eloquent break up letters ever written. Politicians both liberal and conservative, from Green Party to Tea Party have cherry-picked quotes for their own purposes. The most telling phrase of intent was made evident this week when a spectral reading of an early draft revealed an early correction. Thomas Jefferson scratched out the word "subject" and replaced it with "citizen".

I can think of no more apt summation of the document than what that correction implies. I actually got a bit of a chill when that was revealed. It's particularly important when you recall that several of our founding fathers, including Alexander Hamilton, wanted to establish a monarchy instead of a democratic republic. 

The founding fathers got many things wrong (slavery, treatment of Native Americans, those silly white wigs, etc.). But this was one they got right. 

Happy Independence Day (I simply can't relegate it to being called 4th of July) to all fellow citizens.