Liquid Treat

This Valentine's Day, ditch the perishable gifts (chocolates, flowers, kittens) and stock up on sturdy journals from Ex Libris Anonymous. Determined to "rescue hardcover books from a fate worse than death," the Portland-based company creates spiral-bound blank books from its ever-changing collection of beautiful vintage tomes, including cherished childhood classics, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries and pre-molecular gastronomy cookbooks. The old-school titles live on not only through their original covers but also inside the new journal, where the Ex Libris elves scatter a few pages of the original book amongst the fresh white pages for posterity.

Are you a kerning pro? Put your typographic knowledge to the test with KernType, a fontastic online game created by interaction designer Mark MacKay. Your goal: to achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. When you're done nudging, your solution is compared to the "typographer’s solution" and rated on a scale of 1 to 100. Once you've mastered KernType using clicks (of the arrow keys or a mouse), grab an iPad and try your hand at finger-kerning.

The tiny shampoos and shower gels on offer in hotel bathrooms may boast increasingly well-designed labels and containers, but we can't help but imagine landfills teeming with almost-empty versions. Enter Clean the World, an Orlando-based nonprofit that is on a mission to collect all those discarded soaps and bottled unguents, sanitize them, and distribute them around the world to stop the spread of preventable diseases. Ready to do your part for this global hygiene revolution? Clean the World's website offers step-by-step instructions on how to hold your own soap drive, and next time you stay at a hotel, take a moment to mention the Clean the World Hospitality program (megabrands such as Mandarin Oriental have already signed on as partners). You’re bound to check out with a clean conscience.

Designer Todd Oldham and writer Kiera Coffee have outdone themselves with their mega-monograph on Alexander Girard, new from Ammo Books. The product of nearly four years of research and, at 672 pages, an innovative scheme of printing and binding, this coffee table book is a must for any design lover. Oldham was granted exclusive permission to sift through the fastidiously kept archives of Girard (1907-1993), who is best known for his folk art-infused textiles for Herman Miller but also designed everything from buildings to typography. "I'd estimate that 90 percent of the work in the book hasn’t been seen before," Oldham told us recently. "Wait 'til you see the stuff from his early design career, in the '20s." And take a closer look at the image credits: Many of the archival photos were taken by frequent Girard collaborator Charles Eames.

New York's Museum of Modern Art demystifies everything from woodcuts and engravings to photographs and modern-day digital wizardry in The Printed Picture, a new website based on the publication and exhibition of the same name that focused on the history of the printing of pictures. Developed by Read and Note with Richard Benson, former dean of the Yale University School of Art, the site includes eight hours worth of videos that trace the dominant technologies used for printing pictures throughout the modern era. Despite its museum origins, Benson focuses not on museum masterpieces but on "everyday pictures," many of them gathered through his 40-year career as a photographer, printer and junk collector.

BucketFeet only sounds like a disease contracted by sailors in olden times. It's actually a line of snappy sneakers that feature the work of emerging guest artists from around the world. Lightweight and unisex, the colorful kicks were the brainchild of Berkeley native Aaron Firestein, who saw fresh white sneakers as the ideal canvas for his intricate doodles. With the help of Raaja Nemani, who Firestein met while they were both doing volunteer work in Buenos Aires, the two have added a "buy one, give some" spin: 5 percent of every sale is donated to a charitable organization dedicated to helping children. See a style you like? Grab it now, as many of the limited-edition designs sell out before you can say "BucketFeet."