Illustrator is one of the best graphic design tools out there (well now that Adobe has killed Macromedia Freehand anyway). You can draw all sorts of shapes & lines with it.

Who doesn’t remember the Spirograph’s of their childhood, I know I do. Well I came across a cool trick that you can do in Illustrator to create a similar effect. Using one of the drawing tools - Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Star or Flare - you can create a multitude of shapes.

1. Select a tool
2. Hold down the ~ (tilde) key
3. Click and drag to draw your shape

You can then click on each individual shape to add color. By default they’re all the same color.

I created this shape in about 5 seconds, it’s that easy.

When I first started working at NPower Seattle - it was a bit more true than not that an agency budget was a great indicator for capacity to undertake a technology project.

For instance - the smaller the budget - the more likely that an agency wouldn’t be able to fund a planning, implementation, training and maintenance phase. AND - would also require additional help creating business rules, understanding how technology could help, overcoming knowledge gaps and more.

I don’t think that holds true any longer - or at least it holds LESS true. Recently, one of my customers (small budget, small staff) went through a small planning scope and asked some great questions. You should ask YOUR vendor these questions, too:

1. You’re right, the cost is a bit of a stretch for us; we were hoping to get it into the $ range. Can you give me any ideas of what could be cut to save money, and if we did cut something, what that would mean to the integrity of the project?
2. Since data migration is the most expensive thing, is there something that we could do here to take some of that on, like data entry for example, or is it just easier/more efficient to do it on your end?
3. Are you considering the grand total as a maximum that might go down from there, or as a median, that could go up or down? (Or, I suppose, a minimum that might go up?)

And they finished with a great comment, too:

We, of course have to be conscious of cost, but also want this project to be the best it can be, so please feel free to be frank with me about any drawbacks to cutting cost.

Here’s my takeaway:

• Help your customer ask great questions.
• Answer them honestly.
• Be transparent about your pricing
• Ensure that you’re delivering a product that is in THEIR best interests!

Many of our customers use existing website designs or have their own website designers. Some are professionals with a lot of experience in the field, and some are just getting started with web design. In both cases, one of the first questions that needs an answer has to do with the type of design - fixed or fluid. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

This is further complicated by the fact that you can’t control the way a site visitor has configured their monitor and browser! So - while you might really WANT ever visitor to only see a single page (no scrolling) on your home page - you only have a limited capacity to make that happen. Your visitor might have a tiny monitor (think cell phone) or a huge one. And it might be in portrait or landscape mode. And they might size their browser window up or down, or make is tall and skinny or wide and fat - and you don’t get to pick!

You DO get to pick in general though -and that’s where the fixed vs. fluid conversation comes in.

In a nutshell:

• Fixed: This is a design that has a fixed pixel count - and if you adjust your browser window -the content doesn’t change. So - if you make your browser window smaller - then you have to scroll right and left, or up and down.
• Fluid: This is a design that is based on percentages -so that when you re-size your browser window - the whole website resizes to use all of the available space.

Here are some quick links to additional articles about fixed vs. fluid design:

http://www.flyte.biz/resources/newsletters/04/12-fluid-v-fixed-web-pages.php

http://www.destroyallmonsters.biz/articles/guidelines-for-designers/fixed-versus-fluid/

http://www.wolf-howl.com/random-thoughts/fluid-fixed-and-1024-resolutions/

Well the folks over at LifeHacker have done it again. Another great posting comparing Outlook to Gmail. Why is this important? Google is good to nonprofits and Google Apps have a lot of appeal:

• Being Free to nonprofits
• Web-based
• Collaborative
• And many other reasons

Microsoft is also very good to nonprofits. Thanks to their partnership with TechSoup, nonprofits can get Microsoft products at great prices. And with OfficeLive, they too can be (somewhat) web-based and collaborative.

So what’s my point? If your org is thinking about or even interested in Google aps, I recommend checking out the LifeHacker post. I thought it did a really nice job comparing features between Gmail & Outlook.

We’re in a changing world. The clunky CRT monitors of a few years ago are fading quickly - replaced by skinner flat panel monitors. Overall - that’s a good thing - they use less space and less energy and can be easier on the eyes!

But we’re in a world without a clear standard when it comes to sizing up your website. When you implement a new website, you’ll need to choose a size for your website that will meet the needs of most of your constituents. There aren’t a lot of terrific demographics out there to help, either - so this may very well be a bit of a guessing game for you. Do your stakeholders have older  CRT’s? Maybe in the 15 to 17 inch size? Perhaps they have one of the first flat panels - perhaps also in the 15-17 inch size?

But maybe they have a newer flat panel - more of the rectangular shape? Mine is like that - it’s a 19 inch monitor - but it’s long on the bottom (about 17 inches) and about 10 inches wide.  That means long-ish spreadsheets are dreamy to look at, while some websites seem to have a LOT of white space!

Here’s a quick grid to help you size up your website dimensions:

Page widths available (in pixels):

•     600 (suitable for 640×480)
•    720 (suitable for 800×600)
•    780 (just about suitable for 800×600)
•    840 (suitable for 1024×768)
•    900 (suitable for 1024×768)
•    960 (suitable for 1024×768)

Kudos to my senior website consultant Jesse Snyder for the research and to PE Ideas on Web Design for the details!

Have you ever noticed that text in your InDesign document doesn’t seem to align up just right on the left hand side? Either it’s a little bit indented, even though you don’t have an inset applied to the frame? Or it actually spills out of the frame on the left.

Most fonts have a boundary around each letter that controls how they align to each other. In NPower’s InDesign Foundation training, I talk about kerning and how it affects the spacing between certain letter pairs. Well that same boundary can, sometimes, throw off the left alignment to your text frame.

The folks over at InDesign Secrets have a great post about this, with some recommended fixes. I recommend you check it out.

Now I’ve posted before about some great video tutorials that I found through Apple’s iTunes store that were free. Well today I was mucking around on the Adobe website and came across their Video Workshop section on the Adobe website. Wow! they have a lot of nice video tutorials for most of their products.

I recommend you check it out, it’s a mix of basics and advanced techniques. You can find it at http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/video_workshop/about.html

Have you ever come across a printed piece that you really really like and wondered, What Font is this? Or maybe it’s something that your nonprofit had created but you can’t find the original files?

Well the folks over at LifeHacker have a couple of recommendations that may fix that problem. And best of all, they’re both free!

The first is WhatTheFont, which allows you to upload an image (be it scan, photo, whatever) and it’ll try to match the font. Now I’ve been a fan of this site for sometime, but I’ve used it to purchase fonts and didn’t even pay attention to this service.

The second is Identifont, which walks you through a series of questions and then makes recommendations for matching the font.

Both, I think, are worth a gander.

The folks over at InDesign Secrets have wowed me again. This time they’ve taken on bullets & numbering. I’ve seen a few documents where the creator had a bulleted or numbered list and it curved ever so beautifully around, let’s say, a globe. I’ve tried to replicate it myself but never thought of using what’s called a Em Space.

You can check out their post, with step by step instructions on how to accomplish this, at http://indesignsecrets.com/create-perfectly-curved-hanging-indents.php

My co-worker, Patrick, sent me the following link this last week. The PDF in question has 60 tricks you can use in Word. Now some of them I already knew (and include in some of NPower’s trainings), but a some were new to me.

You can check it out at http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tr/downloads/home/60_word_tips.pdf