Design Sapling.com

New and Interesting Online Interactions
280 Slides. It’s beautiful, free, and very useful. An amazing online slideshow maker.

Swype. Take a look at an interesting new way to type on touch screens.

Five Second Test. For UI designers, understanding a users first impression is important. A 5 second test is a usability exercise where you show your interface design for just five seconds and then ask the viewer to describe what they saw. This website makes getting first impression very easy. Make it a part of your design toolbox if you make software or webpages.

Adobe CS4 Product Info. An interesting feature from Adobe’s CS4 product page. Roll over a product name in any of the 4 software bundles, and the same product is highlighted in the other 3 bundles. Makes it easier to compare bundles and decide which is right for you.

Did you know?
Pressing the Alt key in MS Office 2007 software will superimpose the hotkeys used with Alt onto the interface. Now it’s easy even for novices to speed up their workflow and stop using the mouse.

Other Interesting Things
DaPino Colada. Beautiful, free vector images from some talented designers in the Neatherlands.

Konica Minolta: Museum of Beauty. I found this presentation compelling. A virtual tour of the Venus de Milo, one of the world’s most famous sculptures, with insights about how it was made and what it may have looked like if the missing pieces were put in place.

Edit — Link was down last time I checked.

I previously wrote about how taking the time to learn your software can save you loads of time.

Another thing to be aware of is all the great freebies lots of programs throw in. Specifically, I’m talking about templates. Tons of software have template, but it’s not often that we really look to see what those templates have to offer.

Microsoft Word has hundreds of useful template, including legal documents, calendars, agendas, brochures, time management reminders for your team, etc… Really, there’s so much good stuff here, it’s worth it to take a few hours and figure out which ones are useful for your business. Just make sure make a note of it. After all, it’ll do you no good to flip through the templates if you forget to ever use them. I’ve got a word document on my desktop that has a list of templates useful for my team to use on projects. Whenever we get a new project, I’ve already got a huge resource of materials to help us organize, manage, and develop.

The same goes for most products from Adobe, especially InDesign.

Packaged templates are another oft overlooked feature, along with shortcut keys, that can drastically improve your productivity. The trick is taking the time to know what’s there and remember to use them.

Here’s pretty much the final version as far as the illustration goes. The font and background will change to something appropriate for print.

I’ve decided to create either a t-shirt or a greeting card from one of my doodles (if you’re on Facebook, you can see a photo album of my doodles).

Here’s a first draft. There will be guts and blood and maybe hearts above the hooks head. I can see this on a t-shirt. I can see it on a greeting card too! I can’t recall seeing very many funny yet disturbing greeting cards like this could be. Maybe I’ll sell it to the local card shop, Vons.