Productivity method

Posted on January 10, 2012 by admin

For awhile I was experimenting with the Pomodoro Technique to increase my focus and productivity. However I’ve found that taking those small breaks usually interrupted my flow.

Now I’m experimenting with the process of using Spotify or some other music service to work through an album. This has been working out great for me as most albums are around an hours worth of music and focusing for that amount of time seems to be perfect.

My process works something like this:

  • Pick a couple of tasks that need completed.
  • Pick a soundtrack for those tasks.
  • Close all distractions including email and messengers, put away my phone.
  • Put on headphones
  • Dominate
  • Break
  • Repeat

Sometimes after the break I check my email and see what’s going on but the longer you can avoid these things the better off you’ll be I think.

Weekly Design Notes

Posted on December 5, 2011 by admin

Being a designer is a lot of things but one of the most important is being responsible. You are responsible for the project you sign on to and the success or failure of it rests on your shoulders once you take it on.

I used to think that it was the client’s job to make a lot of decisions on a project but now I understand that the reason we are hired on is to provide the answers. To take the reigns of the project and guide it from start to finish towards its objective. If you’re not doing that then you aren’t a professional.

Weekly Design Notes

Posted on November 29, 2011 by admin

This weeks post is a little late and more about some of the tools that I’ve been using to help make my life a bit easier and more streamlined.

Wunderlist

This is a wonderful app that has a web interface as well as a downloadable version for almost every platform including android and iOS. It my go to list app now that I use to gather everything and assign a date to it. Best part is its 100% free.

Launchbar

This little app has sped up my workflow on my Mac by allowing me to quickly launch any application without having to use the app bar. It’s also insanely fast compared to spotlight. I use it with a shortcut of option + space and everything including websites is at my fingertips.

Weekly Design Notes

Posted on November 16, 2011 by admin

Many people have spoken out about Flash and Adobe basically putting the nail in the coffin. As someone that has used Flash for a long time I don’t think I have anything too important to add to that. I’ve barely used Flash on a website recently in a way that makes this upsetting to me.

However, I work at an in-house marketing department for a large corporation. We have lots of Flash projects here. Most of them are not web related and are used for teaching tools or to run a presentation with a bit more flair than PowerPoint can muster. This projects will not go away anytime soon. If you use Flash you will probably still have a job somewhere for awhile yet. Use this time to develop the skills you will need to transition to the next thing.

Track Yourself

Posted on November 16, 2011 by admin

A neat experiment to do is to try and think of all the websites you belong to and how many of them you use. I built a spreadsheet that listed all the sites I’ve ever joined (that I could recall) and have since tried to trim the fat from it.

Someone once said that you should be very careful of the terms used when signing up for these services. Words like belong, follow and all that say something about the type of person you are and the role you elect to place the other people in. I think it’s important watch out for things like that.

Weekly Design Notes

Posted on November 8, 2011 by admin

Container Divs

For the past couple of weekends I’ve been attending Josh Sager’s excellent WordPress workshop. This workshop has been packed full of so many interesting little tidbits that I come out of there excited to get to work. That’s one of the real advantages to attending these events and participating in the community.

One of the great things that Josh shared with us that made me wonder why I never thought of it before is using the body tag as a container instead of wrapping my content in another div.

This raised the question of what to do if you have a background image since the body tag would have to have a width applied to it to contain anything. Josh’s awesome answer was to remind me that you can style the html tag.

So instead of having something like this:

html
head
body
div id="wrapper"
Blah Blah content
div
body
html

You get the much cleaner and cooler version:

html
head
body
Blah Blah content
body
html

Which doesn’t seem like a whole lot but it is those little things that make all the difference between the good stuff and the great stuff.

Weekly Design Notes

Posted on November 2, 2011 by admin

Client Testing Sites

At a class on WordPress theme development this weekend we were talking about the process of showing the client your work. Josh Sager mentioned how he likes to test and develop as soon as possible on the client’s host to avoid bugs earlier on. Josh recommends setting up a subdomain of beta.clientsite.com and testing there. I’m making this my new way to operate and it has a few benefits that are too good to pass up.

  • Building where the site will live is the best way to detect bugs early
  • Less strain on my host
  • Easier for the client to remember
  • Quicker to migrate databases from development to published sites.

I’m going to research alternative ways but currently this seems to be the best way to set up a sandbox for client testing.

Weekly Design Notes

Posted on October 26, 2011 by admin

Rework by Jason Fried

Having just returned from a bit of well deserved rest I don’t really have too much to talk about. However I finally managed to pick up this excellent book that was making waves a few months ago. Here is a book by the founder of a company that has become successful by making their own path and ignoring the so-called rules.

By offering less and focusing on making what they do offer the best they can 37Signals has become a company to be admired. This book shares a bit of their philosophy and the reasoning behind some of the decisions they have made.

Weekly Design Notes

Posted on October 17, 2011 by admin

PowerPoint Design/Formatting

Uploaded by Vixs on May 3, 2004 to stock.xchng

This past week has been a crash course in PowerPoint work. I’ve used PowerPoint in the past but I’ve never had so many presentations or “decks” as they are called here to format all at the same time.

Coming off a little mini-vacation and being told you are assigned a project with 50 presentations that need to be formatted in 3 days is a bit overwhelming. Fortunately it turns out there were only 15 decks as the others had gone out as they were.

The decks were already created but needed to be formatted to have a consistent look and feel to them. When the project was first given to me I was told they needed to be brand compliant but after the first five decks were sent to the client they changed their mind. Unfortunately that meant having to reformat those first five decks to match the newly provided template.

How to make this easier on yourself:

If you find yourself in a similar situation where you have multiple presentations that need to match one another you can save some time by doing a couple of things.

  1. Use the Master Pages

    Master Pages are there for a reason. They allow you to tell the program to take a similar type of content and make it match. So if you have a headline on your slide you can apply that layout to the slide (right click on a PC/ctrl+click on a mac and select layout and choose your template). This can save you loads of time.

    One of the ways I did this was to take the Master pages from my approved layout and copy them to the layout I was working on. Then I could delete the old master pages and a lot of the formatting would change to match the ones I just brought over. All that would be left was a slight bit of clean up.

  2. Look for common slides

    Since these presentations were all from the same group some of them had slides that had similar graphics or were exactly the same. In these instances you can compare the information rather quickly and copy and paste the entire slide.

  3. Test

    Test the presentation by running through it quickly looking for things that might be out of alignment between slides, font-sizes that jump, anything eligible at a glance. Then test the presentation slower and look for any mistakes in the copy, fonts that aren’t correct or to see if just reads badly. This can save you from having to go back into the presentation later because the client caught something you missed.

Weekly Design Notes

Posted on October 9, 2011 by admin

Responsive Design

While I didn’t have the option to attend last weekends Web Design Day a bunch of the presenters have shared the slides of their presentation. A huge theme seemed to be responsive design or designing your site around all devices instead of just a PC first and downgrading it.

The general idea seems to be that more and more people are viewing your content on a variety of unknown devices and you should create a design that expands or contracts to fit whatever screen is viewing you content. This is accomplished through a variety of means including alternate stylesheets, percentage based measurements and the use to ems instead of pixels.

The most often quoted article seems to be Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte on A List Apart.

Style Tiles

Another key takeaway from Web Design Day, revealed to me by attendee Andrew Parrocini, was the idea of style tiles. As it was explained to me, a style tile is a combination of a mood board mixed with loose design elements. So you would have a color palette, maybe some buttons, some loose images and fonts that you show the client. You would do a couple of iterations to more easily establish a direction for the design to take.

It also gets the client involved in the process a bit further which is a huge thing. At each phase the client should be your partner and if they make key decisions before you move forward it is much easier for a final sign off on the project as well as keeping everyone happy.