Liquid Treat

Serenity now! Ditch the yoga mat, grab a pencil and that fresh Rhodia jotter you've been saving for a special occasion, and curl up with a copy of Zen Doodling, out this month from Barron's. Veteran illustrator and artist Carolyn Scrace walks readers through a range of stress-busting sketching exercises, from simple yet soothing patterns using lines and shapes to more complex mandalas, portraits and unique personal alphabets. One disclaimer for the typographically sensitive: the art director of the book apparently got a little too relaxed and decided to set most of the body text for this book in...Lucida Handwriting. Just take deep breaths and repeat after us: "It's not Comic Sans. OM."

Ready to get your work into New York's Museum of Modern Art? Forget the figurative. In conjunction with the current exhibitions "Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925" and "Abstract Generation: Now in Print," MoMA's PopRally committee has put out the call for one-minute videos that explore abstract forms of any kind. Upload yours to the PopRally Vimeo group by Monday, April 1, and it will be played on various screens and projections in the museum lobby and on walls of the atrium during a special party set for the following Sunday.

Load up on creative home goods without leaving your actual home by shopping MyHabit, Amazon's take on the flash sale craze. You know the drill: hefty discounts on brand-name merch for a limited time. The Amazon innovations include a fuss-free interface, integration with your existing Amazon account and free shipping, at lightning speed. Launched with an impressive assortment of fashion brands, the site continues to build up its home and design section. Recent sales have ranged from cult brands (Lexon, MIU France) to oddball treasures (a robot lamp made from industrial pipes, an iPhone cover printed with axes).

Put your money where your eye and your heart is by shopping at Design with Benefits, a new online store. “We partner with companies, promote design efforts, and sell products that embody design activism and ethical values at the core of their businesses,” says Florida-born, Chile-based architect Tania Garbe, whose motivation to found the site was the challenges she encountered while working on design projects overseas. Purchase products such as handcrafted wooden radios, elephant art created to benefit endangered Asian elephants, and copper jewelry made from a salvaged Frank Lloyd Wright roof confident that each month, a percentage of Design with Benefits' net profits is donated to a remarkable public interest project.

Stop, collaborate, and listen with Apollo, a handy app that promises "a better way to work together" for a range of creative types and their clients. Developed by UK-based 27stars, the free app offers a Web-based (login, with a single click, from anywhere), nothing-to-install approach to online proofing and other project tasks, making it ideal for graphic and Web designers, photographers and anyone else working collaboratively with images, documents, digital sketches or other documents.

Turn that frown upside down at "The Happy Show," an exhibition of designer Stefan Sagmeister's work that opens March 20 at the Pacific Design Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. "I am usually rather bored with definitions," says Sagmeister. "Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down." And today in New York City, the Jewish Museum opens "Six Things," the first exhibition of Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh's newly founded design firm, Sagmeister & Walsh. Both shows offer up experiments with potential happiness inducers ranging from meditation and cognitive therapy to playing with water balloons and spelling out maxims in jaw-dropping flights of typographic fancy.