Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

I’m a huge fan of any information organization method, and wireframing and prototyping are two fields I am very interested in, both as a hobby, and prfessionaly in web design. A good wireframing tool (which may well be pen and paper) can save you so much time in the long run, a simple sketch could see you having a calm breakfest and lunchtime nap near product launch instead of 3 nights up in a row.

If you think you know them all, OmniGraffle, Visio, Axure, think again, Wireframes Magazine will show you so many apps, so many techniques, you will have a hard time selecting a method for yourself. What I love about the site is that they not only show apps, but great paper-based techniques and case studies of how others wireframe, so you can steal some valuable methods off other people.

On top of everything else the site’s minimalistic design is pretty cool, and the mechanism by which pressing Ctr will show you a list of posts on the left is also impressive (although might be a bit obtrusive). In any case, this is an awesome site with great tips for productivity and design, go check it out now!

If you’re itching to get your hands on the new Office suite, or you just like trying out new apps, you can give the new office package from Microsoft a thorough try by going to the Office site.

You can get some more info and take a look at the extremely bad quality screenshots at your discretion, but who really cares, just download and go, have fun!

I recently ran into a problem where I couldn’t access my Google Apps email. This has happened a fair number of times compared to Google in the last year or so (2-3), so I thought it’s their problem again, but in some cases, this may not be true. I use custom URL-s for my emails, so I would use mail.hackyourday.com for this domain, but it’s still hosted at Google.

Since I really wanted to check my email this time, I though that maybe it works with the normal address, which would be http://mail.google.com/a/hackyourday.com. Sure enough, it worked like that, so the problem is either at my host, or with Google’s redirection, I don’t know, but the point is, if you use custom Google Apps URL-s to access you mail service, you might want to try checking the non-custom one if yours is down, the fault may not be at Google.

Are you thinking of designing your own business cards? Chances are you will need to go to a printing company to get them done properly, they can churn out 200, on quality 300 gramm paper in about 10 minutes, all cut up and boxed nicely, for around $40-$50. Since this is not a huge expense, I think it is worth the effort to get some done properly, and I have a very quick checklist of things to do before you hand in the documents to get this done.

Measurements

The standard business card size where I live is 90mm x 50mm, which translates to around 3.5 x 2 inches. The bleed should be around 3mm here (0.1 inches), as far as I know, officially, the bleed is between 2-6mm, and around 1/8th of an inch. The bleed is the part of the printing which goes beyond the actual border of the finished product you’re looking for. This is needed for cutting, and to ward off some inconsistencies.

DPI

Dots per inch is another important factor in printing. For web designgs you most likely use the standard 72dpi setting of Photoshop and the like. This is fine for your display, but for printing you will need some higher quality stuff. Printing usually requires 300dpi, which you can set up easily in any image editing software. Note that this setting will make you image seem huge on your monitor, but this is perfectly normal. The business card I mentioned earier was 1063px x 591px which is rather big, but translated to only a 3.5 x 2 inch card.

As an extra note, Photoshop has the option to view “print size”. Take care, as this will most likely NOT yield the correct result. I don’t want to go into full detail here, but the basics are that Photoshop does not know the size and resolution of your monitor, therefore, will not produce an accurate print size. My card was exactly the right size, but if I chose print size in photoshop, it looked roughly 3/4th of the correct size.

Choosing your colors

This is the part where I am completely lost myself. I have learned a lot, but color designation is an art in itself it seems. First and foremost, you need to create your work in CMYK color. The normal color mode is RGB, so your application will create documents by default in that mode. CMYK uses different colors to mix the ones you see on screen, and this is the one needed for print. On your end, you shouldn’t notice much difference. As a note of interest, create an image and save a copy in RGB, and another in CMYK. The open both in Picasa, and you will see that the colors will be all wrong in the CMYK one. It seems weird to me that an image application can’t handle CMYK, although not that Picasa specifically really needs to.

That was the easy part, so far it was just a matter of changing a setting. Now, if you hand in your finished work, they will print it and the colors will still be all wrong. Blue won’t be green, but orange might well become gold-ish, so you still can’t just hand it in. You will most likely have to designate colors from the pantone color scale. Now, if you have Photoshop, you can go to the swatches and select a pantone scale. Pantone Solid Coated is the most common, but ask the company what they want you to use. So you’re supposed to choose a color from here. Now since you are viewing it on your monitor, the correct color actually won’t look correct since your monitor doesn’t reflect the same color you would get. Damn. So, you need a paper based pantone scale, which the printing company definitely has, so you will probably have to go in and take a look. Alternatively you can get a color-calibrated monitor, but I have no idea about these.

So what I did is I went in to the press, got a thick stash of pantone colors and held them up to my screen to find which one the color was. I had two main colors, orange and green, so I wrote up the two codes for these colors. I then chose those colors from the swatches in Photoshop and recolored the elements with these colors. Now everything looked slightly discolored on my monitor, but it promised to look good on paper. I suggest you actually give them the color codes you want if you have a 2-4 color design because they will also take the pantone colors and match it to those original colors, NOT your design.

Choosing the colors and getting them right is by far the hardest thing to do, so don’t worry if you get it wrong, I already have some experience, but I’m still such a layman. I will be off to buy a pantone color scale on paper as soon as I can, I suggest you do the same if you want to go to press often.

File formats

PDF is a pretty standard format for printing presses, but they might also accept other types. To be fair, they accept all formats, but they will probably charge you for the work needed to convert them into formats they can use. If you want to give them press-ready stuff you will need to use PDF or Post script files. The point here is to have the bleed, and to have the file contain all the additional information, like embedded fonts and such. I also recommend using vector images for all the graphics, since these are scalable, and text in particular will be much smoother if printed from vector images.

Overview

The point is that printing in a proper press is not as easy as doing it at home. In particular, color specification is hard, and getting the right format the first time might be challenge. If you know a good company, they will be nice and help you get there. Also, I am not a printing expert, the above is distilled from my personal experience so far, so if I have said something erronous, please let me know. Otherwise, I’m sure they are good tips, but make sure to check and double check everything, and to check and double check with the press people before going to press!

Have you ever had two monitors above each other? I have a fairly big one above my laptop and the most annoying thing is when I want to close a window on my laptop’s screen, and I slide up into the next montior. Since the close button is right in the corner of the windows, you normally just need to swipe the mouse pointer there, but with a monitor on top, you need much more precision.

To counteract this, I came up with a really simple arrangement to let me be less precise. I went into the display settings, and instead of aligning my displays, I nudged the top one to the left, so the right corner of my laptop would not have any screen space above it. This way, when I close a window, I can’t run into the monitor above, woohoo! Take a look at the small screenshot to see how I did it.

I believe this one to be true, however I can’t actually quote any medical texts for you here. I know I read this in many places, and I can confirm it on my own skin, apparently, sleeping 8 hours from 10pm until 6am is way better, than if you sleep from 12am until 8am.There are certain bodily functions which happen at certain times, and for some things happen differently if you’re awake, than if you’re sleeping.

Also, think about how humanity worked for millions of years. We only started using electricity widely about 100 years or so ago, before that, there really was no point staying up at night. The more you stayed up, the more candles you burned, and obviously, outside they weren’t much use. So for millions of years, our ancestory went to bed well before 10am, after the sun set, and got up well before 6am, when the sun rose. I am guessing they were not too tired (at least not from lack of sleep), since this meant a constant 8-9 hours a day.

Over the course of these millions of years, our bodies have become accostumed to this cycle, and our bodily functions have developed in accordance with it. From this it seems pretty obvious to me that our bodies need to go to sleep early and get up early, as opposed to going to bed late, and getting up late. In either case, in the long run, you should get the same amount of sleep, so in the end, it shouldn’t really matter.

Now that I am in posession of this awesomely valuable bit of info, can anone tell me how to wake up feeling fresh? This happens to me abotu once every year, when I wake up, and feel as if I was in the middle of the da, alert, fresh, ready for action. My Dad used to be like that all the time (very annoying… , he would just jump out of bed at 6am, and be utterly himself. Anyway, if you have some tips, let me know!