Today’s Links That Just Make Me Want to Be Better

Here is a list of links found today that just make me want to be a better illustrator/designer/creative-type person:

1. Thinking About Design Trends - Design Mind
2. Designer Neologisms - Design Mind
3. Barney Bubbles: Optics and Semantics - Design Observer
4. 8 Inspiring Type Specimens - Designer Daily
5. From Pascal - Drawn and Quarterly
6. 100 Cereal Box Covers - from the aeron
7. A - Z of Web Design - iampaddy
8. Doug Chiang - Lines and Colors
9. Mediocore - Mediocore

Please feel free to add links you’ve found today below.

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Tags: creative, design, illustration, Inspiration
Posted in General, Inspiration, Work & Productivity

Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Ajax?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Ajax (and especially jQuery) is very cool and is undoubtedly useful for both Internet design and usability.

 
However, with the explosion of all the plugins, widgets, and animation, do you think we’ll see a backlash against Ajax similar to the one we saw against Macromedia Adobe Flash a few years ago? Granted, Flash has SEO issues that Ajax doesn’t, but…

 
…Is there such a thing as too much Ajax?
What do you think?

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Tags: Ajax, Flash, jQuery
Posted in General, Random Thoughts & Questions, Work & Productivity

Sofa-Employed Advice on I Am Paddy

Paddy Donnelly has created a great post featuring advice for all walks of life from all over the Internet and my advice from Success: The Difference Between What You’re Willing to Do and What You Have to Do has been included.

All the advice is really good and I encourage you to check it out!

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Tags: advice, Dan Kellner, I Am Paddy, Paddy Donnelly, productivity, sofa-employed
Posted in General, Work & Productivity

Landing Larger Web Projects

If you’ve been doing freelance web work for a while but haven’t been getting the bigger jobs you want, below are some nuggets of information I’ve used that will help you get better and more lucrative gigs:

1. Be like Judd Apatow.

Do you know how Judd Apatow gets so many films made? He presents the studio with a complete (well-priced) package - a script, writers, a director, producers, and stars. That being said, if you’re a designer, partner with a programmer, and if you’re a programmer, find a designer. Present yourself as an entity that can complete an entire project, front-end to back, and don’t forget about SEO or analytics. There are very few people who can do both design and code well enough to land and support a large client. Having two people at meetings is better than having one. Plus, it always helps to have another set of eyes when it comes to testing.

2. A rose by any other name…

+ Continue reading…

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Tags: 2004 Olympic Team, analytics, Colin Ferm, consultant, consulting, design, feature creep, feature creeper, Judd Apatow, productivity, programming, ROI, self-employed, web development
Posted in General, Work & Productivity

Good, Fast, and Cheap

In 2001, when I first met my business partner, Colin, he explained to me the concept of “good, fast, and cheap” as it applies to indie film making. You get to choose two of three. You can make a film good and fast, but it’s going to be expensive. You can produce a good film cheaply, but it’s going to get done slowly. Finally, you can make a film fast and cheap, but it isn’t going to be good.

This same model can (and should) be applied to web design and development, especially when dealing with a prospective new client. Feel free to explain it to them. If they don’t insult your profession by demanding a fully featured custom e-commerce site designed and built from scratch in one month for ten bucks, you can even be nice about it. + Continue reading…

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Tags: cheap, Colin Ferm, design, fast, good, web development
Posted in General, Work & Productivity

Success: The Difference Between What You’re Willing to Do and What You Have to Do

As I posted on I Got My Start, I started fencing when I was 13 because of a video game I had for my Commodore 64. And when I retired from competition seventeen years and thousands of hours of practice later, I was a member of the 2004 US Olympic Fencing Team, a seven-time member of the US National Team, US National Champion, Pan-American Games Champion, and ranked 1st in the US and 10th in the world.

However, at the end of 1999, I was 23 years old and competing in Seoul, South Korea at the World Championships. We, the US Men’s Foil Team, had just been eliminated from the competition. As I removed my sweaty uniform in disappointment at our performance, the realization that I was not going to qualify for the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympic Games smacked me in the face. + Continue reading…

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Tags: Dan Kellner, Felicia Zimmerman, Fencing, I Got My Start, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, self-employed, social media, Twitter
Posted in Fencing, General, Work & Productivity

TweeterMeter®

I have an idea to expand the functionality of TweetDeck (Or, it could be a separate app.), that was inspired by Beth Harte’s recent post posing the question, “Is Social Media scalable?” and Mack Collier’s response to the post. I’m calling the new functionality TweeterMeeter®.

Currently, TweetDeck lets you separate people into groups and favorites, but what if your group, favorites or number of followers gets so large that all the tweets becomes unmanageable? How would you find the more useful tweets? TweeterMeter® would let you rate (i.e. 1-10, number of stars, naming system, etc) your followers and fellow tweeters and keep track of the the number of tweets and replies. People who are following you would have their avatar marked. You could then sort and display tweets based not only on time of reply, but also on rating, number of tweets to/from a person, and whether the person is one of your followers. Filters could be added so that tweets that only contain certain phrases (which you define) would be pushed to the top or bottom of the list and conversations could be threaded as well.

Your attention span my not scale infinitely, but maybe this could help focus it.

Anybody else think this is a useful idea?

Am I ripping off something that’s already out there? (I couldn’t find anything quite like this in links to Twitter tools I found or was provided.)

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Tags: Beth Harte, Mack Collier, social media, theharteofmarketing.com, TweetDeck, Twitter
Posted in General, Work & Productivity

Sofa-Employed Productivity Tips

After working from my sofa for the better part of seven years, I’ve noticed that I’ve developed some productive work habits- as well as some counter-productive ones. After analyzing how I get the most and best work done, I’ve come to define some guidelines that have improved my productivity, kept me sane, and allowed me to separate my work life from my home life- even though they inhabit the same physical space:

1. Keep Separate Email Accounts for Work Email & Personal Email
I know checking separate email accounts in multiple places can seem counter-productive since it’s really easy to import multiple email accounts into an email client, but I find the act of opening a different email client/website helps me keeps my life separated and organized. I always know what kind of emails I’m getting in which account and it helps to keep my work account free of spam.

2. In the Morning, Don’t Read Work Emails Until You’ve Had Coffee
When I get up in the morning, one of the first things I do is go to the sofa and turn on my computer to surf the Internet, check the weather, etc., before I go out for coffee and a bagel. + Continue reading…

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Tags: consultant, consulting, Hulu.com, productivity, schedule, self-employed, sofa-employed, The Simpsons, web development, work
Posted in Work & Productivity

Watching (Less) Television

I watch television.

A lot of television. (A lot.)

If I’m home and awake, there’s probably a 90% chance that the TV is on. I work with the TV on, read with the TV on, eat with the TV on, even listen to music with the TV on. And of course, I blog with the TV on. (The television’s on right now.)

Since my “office” (aka sofa) is conveniently located in front of the TV, it’s almost impossible not to reach for the remote to get my fix. I’m a slave to the program guide because I don’t have TiVo or DVR. (My friends tell me I need to get one.) If I do miss a cable show, I can usually just watch it the next day; network shows I catch up on on the Internet (Hulu.com) or iTunes. Most of the time I don’t care what’s on though, just that I have dialogue in my ears and flickering images in my peripheral vision. + Continue reading…

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Tags: consulting, Guitar Hero, Hulu.com, Law & Order, productivity, self-employed, television, TV, work, www.kill-television.com, XBox 360, XBox Live
Posted in Work & Productivity