I have to face my demons: I am an obsessive person. I clean absolutely everything on my desk before starting a new project. I shelve my books rigidly according to my own idiosyncratic system. I organize my fonts into endlessly parsed categories of style. Perhaps it’s not such unusual behavior for a designer. But it’s why I’m writing about Merel Brouns’s Personal Timeline. It’s a project that appeals to my own weird compulsions.