PixieGirl Blog » Resources

Feeling Truly Blessed Today

pixiegirldesigns — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:51:20 +0000

As is tradition, I was woken up to my mother singing Happy Birthday to me. Each year, my parents call me first thing in the morning. Today, my mom called first, she let me sleep in this time (7:20am), LOL. Since then I’ve gotten calls and ecards from family, txt messages from friends and a plethora (I like to throw that in from time to time, oh, El Guapo) of birthday wishes on Facebook. I’m truly feeling blessed.

I usually take my birthday as a personal day to reflect on my life, be grateful for what I have and start thinking of what changes I’d like to make (and hopefully how to make them happen). Kind of like we all do on New Year’s. To me, it just feels a little more “right” to do it on my birthday. So I’ll start off the morning with some breakfast and TV and then a little introspection before we proceed with tonight’s festivities!

Mac Spaces Keep Me Organized

pixiegirldesigns — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:37:12 +0000

I’d been hesitant to work in Spaces on my Mac, until now… Space 1: Adobe Programs. Space 2: Email. Space 3: iTunes and Social Media. Love it!!!

Spaces helps reduce clutter on your desktop by allowing you to group your application windows according to the way you work and easily switch between them.

I had tried working in Spaces a while back, when they first came out, but unfortunately I gave it a go when I was really busy at work. I didn’t have the patience to play with it and opted out. Recently though, again getting busy, I’ve had way too many windows open at once. Sure I can minimize them, but I like having certain apps open. So I decided to give Spaces another go and it’s really helping me stay organized.

The great thing is, you can very easily customize your Spaces. You can have 2, 3, 5, 10 different ones at once. And they allow you to customize your shortcuts, so you can pick the keys that are easiest for you to navigate with!

Apple has a great intro to Spaces “how to”, Mac 101: Using Spaces to organize your windows and applications. If you’ve never used Spaces in the past, I really recommend giving it a try. Especially if you constantly have a lot of things open. Just make sure you give it a try when you have a little bit of time to play with it.

Do you use Spaces?
I usually keep about 3 spaces open, but of course they let you have more or less. How do you split up your windows?

Readers and Twitters and Feeds!

pixiegirldesigns — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:46:12 +0000

Social Media can get a little overwhelming at times. With RSS Feeds, Twitter, Facebook, etc. there is just so much out there to read, I sometimes don’t even know where to start! The trick is to get a little organized.

Yes, yes, Spring Cleaning applies to anything that needs a little organizing. I just spent some of my morning re-arranging my TweetDeck. I love TweetDeck because it allows me to keep all the people I follow on Twitter in one easy-to-use location. Not only that, it allows me to have multiple Twitter accounts AND add things like Facebook (personal and fan page), Linked In and MySpace (which I no longer use, but I thought I’d mention it). I can tweet, post and reply all in one place. Plus I can post to multiple accounts at once, I don’t have to sign in to Twitter and write a message that I know I will also copy and paste into Facebook, for instance.

Lists for Twitter are the best! They allow you to keep all your followers organized. I have a list for my friends, musicians, Graphic Designers, Web Designers… you can add as many as you want. The problem I realized I had was that my lists were too broad. I have all design related stuff together, which is great, but a lot of my tweets from people I really wanted to hear from where getting lost in a sea of ReTweets. So I then separated them into Design, Design2 and Design Echo! Yes!!! Now the people I find have the most original tweets get sorted into once place, people I like but don’t always follow too closely are in another and twitters who have more RTs than actual content can go in a third column. This way I stay on top of the people I’m most interested in, without having to unfollow the people that send 200 tweets a day! LOL.

Yes, my TweetDeck loads a tiny bit slower now because I’ve broken it down into so many columns, but at least I can more easily find what I need.

The next order of business, will be to organize my Google Reader. In the past I just bookmarked blogs that I liked into one category and go into it regularly to see what’s new. My bookmark page started to get huge and after a while I couldn’t remember what some of these blogs were! Now, I’m using Google Reader to add my favorite blog feeds, the ones I follow daily. It will tell me when there is a new post to a blog without me having to actually go to the blog and see. I like it better than adding an RSS Feed to my browser because it very clearly shows me what blogs have new content, this way I only click on what I will read. It also allows you to create folders if you want to further organize your feeds. Feel like reading Health related things today? You’ve got a folder for that. Design? Yup, you get the idea.

How Do You Organize Your Social Media?
I know there are a ton of apps out there and these are just two of my favorites. What else do you recommend?

Color Resources

pixiegirldesigns — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:22:31 +0000

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and I’m finally getting around to it. Below are a few color resources that I find invaluable in my design workday. Hopefully you’ll find these useful as well. :)

Designer’s Guide to Color

Designer’s Guide to Color is a compilation of small books with various color combinations to inspire you as you work on anything from logos, posters, packaging or anything really you can put color to. You can buy the books individually, or you can get the box set, which has 5 books in it. Each book contains over 1,000 color combinations and they each emphasize different aspects, such as tints, pastels, intense vs subdued, complex patterns, etc. It’s very helpful when you’re, for example, translating a logo from black & white to color, or when you need a complementary color for one you’ve already selected.

Color: Messages and Meanings – A Pantone Color Guide

This book, as the title states, talks to the meaning behind colors. It goes into a little bit of color theory, showing you about monochromatic schemes, complimentary colors etc. But the main thing about this is showing you the feeling colors evoke. When you think “invigorating”, what cold you choose? What about “exotic”? What colors are considered more “assertive”? The thing I like most about is that that not only does it give you a list of colors, or a sheet full of combinations to work with, it also shows different pieces created using these color schemes. It’s always helpful to see how others have used these colors. Sometimes you look at a color set and can’t really visualize it, but here, you have a great resource. This is of course a book by Pantone, so all the colors used are Pantone based, but they also provide a CMYK breakdown in the back portion of the book.

ColorZilla for Firefox

Moving away from books, and into the web, another great resource is the ColorZilla plugin for Firefox. Install this on your browser, and you can use it to see the breakdown of colors used on your screen provided in RGB and Hex. It makes it a little easier than taking a screenshot, opening it in Photoshop and using the color picker.

Pantone Colorbridge

It took me a while to purchase this one, because its over $100, but I haven’t regretted it for a moment. There’s a few Pantone color guides, but for me the best is Colorbridge Coated. It shows you the Pantone inks and next to it, it has the CMYK equivalent. As you know (or are now learning) a Pantone ink is a special blend of colors so using your regular printer will not reproduce it exactly. Particularly blues and purples, they don’t get the same intensity. You may have selected a Pantone color for your logo (packaging, print piece…) and will be printing it at your local printer. It’s helpful to see what it will look like in CMYK. Likewise you may have created a color just from the colorpicker in Photoshop or you might need to find a Pantone color to match a print. You can use this booklet which fans out so you can find the closest match

ColorMunki

This last item I’m going to mention I have not used myself, but I thought was really cool. ColorMunki is a spectrophotometer, which allows you to literally scan colors off pretty much anything. Want to use the exact color on your favorite shoes to create a website? Scan it with ColorMunki. Saw a photograph in a magazine and want to use that color for your logo? Scan it! Now I haven’t bought it because I haven’t really had a chance to really look into it, and basically because I can probably get a close enough match with my Pantone book. But, if anyone out there has used it, I’d love to hear what you think of it!

Adium Instant Message App

pixiegirldesigns — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:17:50 +0000

I admit this might be a tad premature as I’ve only just downloaded it last night, but I LOVE Adium! I have been debating what to do with my email accounts and instant messagers. I have YahooMessenger, which I only really use to get email alerts, I’m always offline. I also have MSN messenger, which I actually do use for chatting. There’s also AOL which i don’t even bother to sign into anymore because I just don’t want to have too many apps open. I had come across Digsby which sounded like the perfect solution, but unfortunately there is no Digsby for Mac. At least not yet. Curses!

So in doing a simple google search, I found someone who was asking are there any good programs like Digsby for Mac? which is exactly what I was looking for. And voila! One of the reco’s was Adium. And it’s FREE! Yay!

I really love how customizable Adium is. You can add AOL Messenger, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, Facebook, ICQ and a few others that I didn’t even know existed! You can set different statuses (online, offline, invisible) to each account and you can even receive email alerts, which was one of the main reasons I love this so much. Most other instant message apps that gather various programs only allow you to chat but not be alerted to emails. It also allows you to change your interface so it looks just like you want it. Not only the background image/colors, but the layout. Whether there is a buddy icon shown, or if new chats open in a new tab or new window. They have a page on the site of just Xtras, from contact list styles, to emoticons to the dock icon. Yes, you can even choose the dock icon! So far I’ve only changed the little ducky’s color from green to purple, but there are a bunch of other icons to choose from.

I’m still playing with it, but so far I’ve not been disappointed. I feel its very well thought out and has so much that can be customized, I feel most people will be able to get it working exactly how they need it to. I definitely recommend it.