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!

If your work concerns developing online applications (or iphone apps), the best tool you can use as the basis of your website is a wireframe. A site wireframe is basically a quick mockup, or draft of your site. It is a wonderful tool to have because it can put your management at ease, they will see what the site will do, how, they can easily add their input, etc.; but it also aids the developer because he or she will know exactly what to build and with what functionality.

I set out to find a good wireframing app, and while free software like Pencil were great, it just didn’t have what I was looking for. I tried out a few others, and the one which fitted my taste best was iPlotz. There are about 87 reasons I like this application, and only 3-4 things I would change or add, all in all, not a bad ratio, so let’s take a closer look at it!

If you work in a team, the biggest advantage you have is that iPlotz has a Desktop version via Adobe Air, and an online version. You can also share your work in numerous ways, the easiest is to simply create a preview URL and send it to someone. Since iPlotz supports page linking, your mockup will function like a navigatable webpage.

In the editing area it surpassed other application, simply because I connected more with it, it was more intuitive, easier to handle, and most of all, very quick. Choose from the left side list, drag and drop onto the canvas, change properties if necessary, and you have your element. The most wonderful thing is probably that the application supports some common shortcuts. Select an element, click CTR+D, and you duplicate it, CTR+C copies, CTR+V pastes, and so on. These controls enable you to rapidly build and deploy a mockup which your co-workers can work on as well, or others can comment on easily.

The one feature which will save you about a hundred hours is the master pages. These are templates, containing elements which are common to many pages. You just need to create these elements on a master page, and whenever you want these to be visible on wireframe pages, just link it to the wireframe page, and the contents of the master page will be visible on the wireframe page. This is perfect for headers, sidebars, and so on, which are on most pages of a site. You can create more master pages in case some pages on your site have a different configuration.

iPlotz also allows you to build your own library. If you have an image or an icon to add, just select it from your harddrive and it will be added to the pallette on the left in the My Library section. Apart fro your own library, iPlotz comes with some pretty great icons of its own, so take a look at those before uploading your own, the idea here is to have a mockup, not a design, so you shouldn’t actually be using your own design elements at all.

If you don’t find what you need in the library, and you don’t have something ready-made on your harddrive, iPlotz offers some basic drawing tools, rectangles, polygons, circles, stars, lines to be exact. You won’t get Photoshop quality results, but they more than siffice for wireframing.

Now, let’s take a look at the dark side of the application. I’d rather call it gray in this case, there aren’t any things wrong here, only some features I would tweak a bit, or add to. The thing that bothered me the most was the way elements like menubars, lists, and so on are handled as links. You can create a link from any element, which is a very goo feature, but you can not create links from members of a menu bar. When you create a menu bar, you can create the items on the bar by just typing text, so you either create a link from the whole thing, no link at all, or try a workaround, like putting buttons next to each other, and creating links from those.

Apart from this, the only functional problem I had was that if you switch between pages you always get a “do you want to save” dialog if you haven’t saved it. It would be more beneficial if the app doesn’t support multiple pages open, to just autosave stuff when you switch, or have this as an option at least.

Overall, iPlotz is what an application should be. To me it’s pretty obvious when a team sat down and thought about how they could add usefulness and “ergonomics” into an app. I love the design of the application, the visual style of the mockups, the way pages ara handled, and so on, iPlotz gets way-way more things right than wrong, it’s a breeze to throw together a multiple page mockup (and fun), it is well worth the low-end price tag of $75.

When I try and organize an aspect of my life I tend to go for the best apps which can cover all of what I need and more, and allow me to customize them, and allow me to theme them, and let me retrieve the data in any way I want, and let me manipulate them and re-import them…… This already sounds too complicated a method to work right? In fact, whenever I start to do something I use a very simple tool. I then get all these urges to try out bigger and better options, then code my own custom solution. In the end, I just wind up using the simplest tool I started with, since I realize I want to organize myself, as opposed to write software to do it.

In that spirit I decided to just shut up and use the easiest solution for most of my needs, a simple spreadsheet in Excel. While this may only give me 95% of what I need, at least I am spending 1% of my time organizing myslef, instead of 5-8%, which is a great timesaver. In addition, I really don’t need fancy features like geo-tagging tasks, automatic expense tracking and so on, Esxcel is always at hand, I can enter a task, an expense, a project in about 5 seconds, and just forget about it.

The reason I think this simplicity works is that even the most complex project is composed of very simple bits. If you can find the right way to put your data into tables, you will end up with a complex system, but very simple information input, lowering your workload, while increasing your tracking capabilities.

Excel (the same goes for Open Office Calc, and even Google or Zoho spreadsheets) allows you to customize your tables, filter them, order them, export the data in countless ways, create dynamic tables with equations, share your work, and so on, so it’s not as if it was featureless either!

Since I do a lot of web development, I use SQL all the time, and I do use it a lot for personal stuff. It’s basically the same when you learn Excel; first you use it for your work, then you realize you can also store your own budget in an Excel sheet. I usually favor SQL over Microsoft Access for the obvious internet reasons, but in some cases, even if you are an SQL developer, you might want to use Access.

If you’re keeping track, you know I am working on an open source software site, and I plan to catalogue a bunch of apps in advance; my first idea was to use an SQL database. It is quicker to quickly write an HTML page where I can enter each software in a form, but as my requirements grew, this became more and more work. I have to have the flexibility of a dtabase, but it’s not a hugely important task, so I don1t want to spend ages and ages on it. Access can help you a lot in this.

Since it’s more user-friendly from a user interface point of view, you can create some great tables very quickly, along with a form to input data into them. If I want a really good form in an HTML page I need to write a lot of queries, populate select boxes and so on, and any time I think of a new feature, I need to do some coding. This takes me away from my real task, which is to just build a list of apps.

If you’re looking for a quick way to store data in a structured fashion, I would advise using Access since it’s much more “plug and play”, and when you’re done, just convert the whole thing to SQL as needed. You can find how to convert the databse in the Microsoft Knoweldgebase.