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It's one thing for an accounting firm to send out a fruit basket every holiday season to its client base—it's quite another thing for a design company. A good designer knows that its Christmas gift is really a marketing effort; done correctly, it can generate great buzz and be quite memorable. That's why I send out crap every year. Seriously.

Tibor Kalman, giant of design philosophy, once aptly articulated, "I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That’s what we really pay attention to anyway. We don’t talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing." He's inarguably correct on that matter. And true to form, his Christmas gifts were legendary and insane. Over the years at his firm M & Co., Tibor sent gift-wrapped food from a homeless shelter with a powerful story along the lines of "imagine if this were your life." He sent B-title used books with $26 in them (deliberately one dollar over the tax-deductible gift amount) with an envelope challenging the receiver to either contribute the money to a charity or pocket the cash. These were his self-entitled "conscience bombs." He even did things that were just plain silly, like sending out dictionaries that he merely re-skinned with a proprietary cover and end-papers, or sending out cases of M shaped cookies.

When I started my own company, I knew that I had to live up to my company name in all of my promotions. And with a name like Polemic, it had to be really against the grain. I had to send out anti-Christmas gifts. My first year, I sent out what I considered to be the worst gift I've ever personally received: a pair of tube socks. Except I sent out 3 socks, along with the message, "It's the thought that counts." It was probably the funniest unstructured social experiment ever. I received clumsy diplomatic responses like, "Thanks, I really needed socks" to the more derisive "What the hell is this?" My sharp clients immediately "got" it and lauded the humor. I followed it up the next year with sending out company t-shirts; another banal corporate standard— except I sent them out with a massive iron-burn mark on the back of the shirt. They were wrapped with an insightful quote from James Joyce: "Mistakes are the portals of discovery." There's no design I've created more rewarding than this one—because every once in a while I'll see someone in public wearing the shirt, and I know they are subjecting their person to the same confusion I've experienced wearing it. "Do you know your shirt is burned?!"

All of these gifts border on Dada-ist. They're innocuous objects that have been injected with an idea—objects that are now physical records of conceptual thinking. Sure you can use them, but they're just as comfortable being a sculpture on your desk. Which is what brought me to this year's gift: I sent out pencils with, well, unusually long erasers.

The idea was born out of a mistake—(i.e. gift No. 2). Some marketing promo company, in an effort to woo me, lifted my logo off my website, flipped it around (because obviously it was accidentally backwards), and sent me a Wall St. banker's pen with my front-wards backwards logo on it, with an enticing note—"Pens make a great promotional gift: Everyone uses them, and they're affordable!" Ugh. I knew I had to make this my gift; but do it my way.

Packaging designers are sorely-underrated. The psychology of a package changes the impression of the product so much that in focus group studies, people actually tasted flavor differences. This year's packaging was particularly reflected upon, because I knew there were so many variables that would have changed the communication. After all, it's a pencil, so regardless of it's uniqueness, it has an element of disposability to it. A good package can change the pace of the unveiling process, making it seem more precious. Think Rocher versus Twinkie. Also, the quantity of the pencils was an issue: too few and it looked stingy and ungenerous, too many and they risked becoming too common, too usable. I also sealed the package off with a Bobby Kennedy quote: "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly," which imbued the mutant erasers with a sense of purpose.

The process of being your own client every year at the busiest time of the year is a major cross to bear. But it's every designer's dream! The Christmas gifts of Tibor were so legendary that he ended up making products out of some of them, many of which are now permanently residing at MoMA. And it really is a great time of the year to reinforce the most important concept in all of design: it really is the thought that counts.