You have to balance security with convenience.

It's convenient to use a shorter password, but it's less security.
It's very secure to store on paper, but it's quite inconvenient.

There is Armory, which attempts to make this more convenient. You need a separate offline computer, which can be any old (or new) cheap laptop, which is supposed to be never connected to the internet, ever, again.

I personally prefer doing things myself, and offline backups of wallets work for me. Paper wallets will always work as long as you can read the paper, which is going to be a long time.

Cold storage is supposed to take longer to do, so you do less frequent transactions.