Design-Design - Designing for business, academia and the arts

Remember The Milk – is a great FREE online tool for creating to do lists that can be shared between you and your colleague, client and designer. In fact, you can even send each other jobs and tasks if you want to cause friction This tool can be integrated into the Google home page, accessed by mobile phone and used in a whole browser window. Daily reminders are sent in list form which can be very handy when there are many tasks building up in a month.

iGoogle as a web browser homepage – every time my browser opens or I use the home button the Simcoemedia Google page is shown. To create your account simply login / create a Google account then edit the settings for displaying your content by ADDING items. It is easy to set up and provides an informative and constantly updated dashboard for your business.

Xmarks – a great FREE plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer web browsers. User’s bookmarks will automatically synchronise between all computers running the Xmarks plugin and logged into the same account. This is particularly useful if you have more than one computer for your browsing and general business – you may have an office and home machine or a main workstation and a netbook that can synchronise to avoid constant updating between browsers.

YouSendIt – is a useful program designed to help you send large files without blocking up someones email account or needing to set up tricky FTP sites. Its simple and you can send files up to 100Mb without signing inl. Paying customers can send up to 2Gb per upload with masses of FTP space and plenty of happy customers who can easily access their emails [ie you have not filled their inbox with your data!] and the file you’ve sent them!

FreeMind – another FREE download that is great for formalising your spider diagrams, mind maps, brain-dumps [or whatever you like to call them] for presentation or submission purposes. Once the initial learning curve is overcome then creating diagrams is relatively straight forward, with a variety of options for highlighting, adjusting text, creating lists and nodes and other techniques for communicating your lateral thinking. Diagrams can be exported to PDF and various bitmap formats such as JPEG, BMP etc.

Skype – theres not too much you cannot do with Skype these days and I find it most useful when sharing my design work on screen whilst talking to my client on Skype at the same time. It is FREE to use and Skype to Skype calls cost nothing – which is particularly relevant when you consider that any phone with Skype, such as many of the 3 phones, can make and receive these calls for FREE also. It is also a great replacement for a landline at around £4 / month for any UK landline – but only if you have a speedy connection to the internet otherwise this system can create embarrassing lags in those business conversations when there is high traffic volume.

Quicktime – if you have some digital video input as raw video via Firewire and just need a quick edit and professionally compressed look to your final output then you could do worse than spend the £25 Quicktime are demanding from you for a license to access Quicktime Pro. One of the best features of Quicktime Pro is the excellent H.264 Codec that really shrinks your video size down but maintains high quality output. If nothing else, you should invest in this piece of software for that Codec alone. Files are easily accessed from a PC or Mac with Quicktime installed.

Google Reader – Another part of the Google suite of free online products which basically collects the latest news from all of your favourite sites without you needing to visit those sites to check out the headlines. Personally, I keep up to date with the world of design through online RSS feeds grouped together in Reader, grouped into an easy to read format and constantly updated. This can save alot of surf time and effort to get the news you really want to read.

OpenOffice – Most people know about Open Office now, but in case you do not – it is a free suite of office programs very similar and compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint products. There are occassionally a few compatibility or inconsistency issues but generally this makes a great alternative to shelling out £400 for the Microsoft products.

Acrobat.com – Adobe have created some excellent design software such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. They have also created a website where the user has access to a variety of media production related tools including PDF conversion for those without Acrobat Standard or Professional, file sharing where a massive 5Gb file can be uploaded, ConnectNow for screensharing and professional online meetings and Buzzword, a document writer. PDF conversion requires payment to Adobe but other services are FREE.

CamStudio – is a FREE screen capture tool. With this free download you can record your on a computer screen then output a file containing video to a compressed file for delivery over the network. To put it simply, this is a great tool for creating a series of software training videos for your business! Beware though – lengthy screen captures from your PC will create large files. You might want to consider paying for a YouSendIt.com account if you want to create and send this sort of data.