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An overview of the last year on pix​e​lyzed​.com

Now that 2008 is just about to start, I thought it would be a good idea to write a pix​e​lyzed​.com style year end review.

There’s been a lot of activ­ity in our lit­tle world last year as well as in other areas of the soft­ware indus­try. Throughout 2007, I dis­cussed prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies that can help our work flows and processes in new ways and my own process has evolved sig­nif­i­cantly. Now I’ll try to sum­ma­rize some of it and share some of my best finds of the year in sev­eral cat­e­gories. There are some new things in here I didn’t dis­cuss before so enjoy!

pix­e­lyzed is growing

Although I still am not a very pro­lific blog­ger, Pixelyzed has grown in read­er­ship last year and I have made an effort to share my more inter­est­ing dis­cov­er­ies as they apply to Web design­ers and cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als. I have also tried to write about more var­ied top­ics and I will keep doing so in the new year.

2007 has been a year of growth and change for my career as well. I have tack­led a cou­ple of large Web design projects and have started doing sub-​contracting work again.

Behind the scenes, I have been work­ing on a new ver­sion of my pro­fes­sional site web​fo​cus​de​sign​.com and started mar­ket­ing locally more aggres­sively. Once the new ver­sion of that site goes up some­time in the next few months, I will inten­sify these mar­ket­ing efforts.

Another project I’ve been work­ing on is my wife’s port­fo­lio site as she is a gifted artist– painter. I’ve gone through a few design iter­a­tions and we finally decided to go with a very sim­pli­fied and unclut­tered look. I’ve looked at dozens of painters and pho­tog­ra­phers’ Web sites and real­ized that the bet­ter ones really put the empha­sis on the artist’s work and every­thing else recedes. We also decided to go Flash all the way which means I’ll have to re-​acquaint myself with it and give myself a quick crash course. If any­one has good advice on good Flash books, I’m all ears. I don’t want books that go through the basics but books that teach solid tech­niques for real world projects and functionality.

The year in software

This is a really quick overview as I will write a sep­a­rate post ded­i­cated to the year in soft­ware to be pub­lished later. I must say that 2007 has been a very excit­ing year for me. Here are a few of the stand­out prod­ucts I’ve been using last year which have been help­ing me get my job done more efficiently.

Adobe Creative Suite 3

The major new soft­ware suite release from Adobe… and the first iter­a­tion of the inte­gra­tion of exist­ing Adobe prod­ucts and for­mer Macromedia ones. There was a lot to get excited about here as most prod­ucts received seri­ous upgrades. Standouts for me include Illustrator and InDesign.

Fireworks CS3

In spite of all our spec­u­la­tion, Fireworks is still alive and got bet­ter under Adobe’s care. After the extreme dis­ap­point­ment that Fireworks 8 was, Fireworks CS3 was an encour­ag­ing release. But Adobe still has a lot of work to do to ful­fill Fireworks’ early promise as key areas of the appli­ca­tion have been neglected for years and still have got no love in CS3. Looking for­ward to CS4, there are sev­eral key areas I’d like to see improve. More in my next post…

FreeHand MXa

Creative Suite 3 is the release that finally and offi­cially marked the death of FreeHand and the offi­cial word from Adobe is that FreeHand users should now migrate to Illustrator. This deci­sion leaves a lot of long time FreeHand users who feel that Illustrator is not an ade­quate replace­ment in the cold and I feel for them. Removing com­pe­ti­tion is never good for any indus­try and this is no excep­tion. More later…

MindJet MindManager 7

MindManager is my best soft­ware find of 2007. It’s the appli­ca­tion that had the biggest impact on my process and work flow. It is a fan­tas­tic knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion man­age­ment tool that is flex­i­ble enough to help through all phases of a Web design projects. I would really encour­age every cre­ative pro­fes­sional to at least try it. I will keep shar­ing tips and ideas on how I use MindManager in my own work through the new year so stay tuned!

JCVGantt Pro 3.0

The per­fect com­pan­ion to MindManager, JCVGantt can both be use as a stand­alone appli­ca­tion and as an add-​in for MindManager. Planning and sched­ul­ing projects has always been a hard and tedious task for me. JCVGantt Pro makes it a lot eas­ier and inte­grates seam­lessly with MindManager. It is extremely flex­i­ble in how it lets users set resources para­me­ters like work­ing and non-​working times and days, hourly and fixed costs and more. It updates the Gantt charts, total costs and the MindManager maps it is tied to in real time as you make changes to resources or tasks. A great dis­cov­ery for me.

Studiometry 5.0

The other piece in my project man­age­ment and admin­is­tra­tion puz­zle. I’ve been using Studiometry since mid 2006 to track and keep client and project infor­ma­tion, track com­mu­ni­ca­tions but also as a timer for bill­able time and then for invoic­ing. Studiometry does a lot more than that and it got a major upgrade to ver­sion 5.0 in 2007. Check it out!

FeedDemon 2.5

Control infor­ma­tion over­load and get the lat­est info from all your favourite Web sites in one place. I’ve been using FeedDemon to sub­scribe and read RSS feeds for a while now (since it first came out) and I couldn’t live with­out it. It this age of infor­ma­tion over­load, it’s the main “hub” through which I get indus­try news and more. It has too many fea­tures to go into here but if you use Windows, this is the only feed reader you need to consider…

Windows Vista

Vista got a bad rap last year for a vari­ety of rea­sons but I love it myself. Moving to Vista has brought me lit­tle trou­ble and a real boost in enjoy­ment and pro­duc­tiv­ity. It’S true that my new com­puter has the pow­er­ful hard­ware to sup­port it so Vista for me is fast and extremely sta­ble. Much more so in fact than XP ever was for me. A great sur­prise for me and I can’t wait to see the improve­ments SP1 brings.

The year in music

Many of you know I’m a musi­cian and a music fanatic in gen­eral. 2007 was a great year in music for me as well. I’ll also post a sep­a­rate entry on my musi­cal finds of the last year but here’s a lit­tle taste of my 3 best musi­cal dis­cov­er­ies of 2007. More later…

XM Radio

2007 is the year I dis­cov­ered satel­lite radio and more specif­i­cally, XM Radio. It is where I dis­cov­ered sev­eral of the artists who’s music I fell in love with in 2007. XM Radio has more var­ied playlists than Sirius and more inter­est­ing chan­nels. I carry my radio from the home to my car and the office and I re-​discovered the joy of lis­ten­ing to music for hours. I dis­cov­ered many new tal­ents on XM and I bought more CDs in the last year alone than in the prior 5 because of it. Couldn’t live with­out it now…

Grace Potter and The Nocturnals

My biggest musi­cal crush of the year… on more lev­els than one . If you never heard of Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, you have to visit their site and lis­ten to some of the samples.

They play great music lead by a phe­nom­e­nal voice with amaz­ing raw emo­tional inten­sity. And Grace is adorable to boot… ;- ) Just give them a lis­ten if you like rootsy but intense rock music based on well above aver­age song­writ­ing. Current stand out songs for me include “Apologies” and “Loose Some Time” (next week it may be two other songs…) both of which are slower num­bers but the band also excels at the more intense rock­ers that fill out the rest of the album and fuel their live shows.

The music press is sim­ply gush­ing about them and her and the band appar­ently gives amaz­ing con­certs. Don’t miss them if they come play in your city. If they ever come play in Montréal, I’ll be first in line to see them… In the mean­time read this review of one of their recent shows to whet your appetite.

Missy Higgins

Another young and extremely gifted female song­writer. Higgins is folk­sier than Potter but just as intense. This Australia native was another XM Radio dis­cov­ery for me. Not long after hear­ing her music on XM, my wife and I had the plea­sure of see­ing her per­form on the Australian seg­ment of Live Earth and we were imme­di­ately hooked. Great melodies sung with a very notice­able Aussie accent that just adds to the charm of her music. I’m really sur­prised she does not get more air­play or expo­sure in North America.

Again, give her music a lis­ten, you’ll be glad you did.

The year in learning

One of the more excit­ing aspects of work­ing in the Web design indus­try for me is the need to con­tin­u­ally learn new things. I have dis­cov­ered a few great resources last year that I will now share with you.

Some of those resources or sites that may seem pretty basic to those who’ve been in this busi­ness for a while but I like read­ing about dif­fer­ent approaches so I can look at my work from a fresh per­spec­tive from time to time. Some of this stuff will be known to you but it may still con­tain great refreshers.

Less expe­ri­enced Web design­ers would be wise to look at some of those resources closely, spend qual­ity time at those sites and absorb some of the wis­dom their cre­ators are spread­ing mostly for free.

Learning keeps your mind young and fresh so, enjoy!

Before & After PDF Subscription

For any designer inter­ested in read­ing excel­lent prac­ti­cal arti­cles with great design tips and ideas pub­lished on a reg­u­lar basis, Before & After deliv­ers great value for the money and teaches you how the pros do it and why. Even pros will learn new things and will at the very least be inspired to try new approaches to solve design prob­lems. I know I have.

I’ve actu­ally been a sub­scriber for a cou­ple years now but it seems the qual­ity of the arti­cles has kept improv­ing through­out the year. If you sub­scribe you’ll also get access to a num­ber of past issues. Before & After mag­a­zine is one of the best of its kind so take a look at the sam­ple PDF’s on the site and you’ll see what a great value it is.

Save The Pixel — The Art of Simple Web Design

I dis­cov­ered this e-​book through the feed of the “Web Design From Scratch” Web site cre­ated by Ben Hunt. Every work­ing Web designer should prob­a­bly read it as it is shock full of great tips and advice for cre­at­ing effi­cient Web sites that suc­ceed at cre­at­ing great user experiences.

The book is very well writ­ten in that it does not just explain the prin­ci­ples behind Hunt’s “Save the Pixel” design phi­los­o­phy but also pro­vides numer­ous case stud­ies of Web site re-​designs. Each case study shows the orig­i­nal site and explains why it wasn’t exactly suc­cess­ful. Then it shows the redesigned ver­sion and explains why it works bet­ter and why key design deci­sions were made.

The book would be an excel­lent resource even for sea­soned Web design pros but it should be required read­ing for all aspir­ing and new Web design­ers but espe­cially wannabes who think that what they do is design when they have no real process and just like to make “pretty things” with­out fore­thought, plan­ning or direc­tion. Sadly, there are a lot of peo­ple like that in our indus­try vying for the same projects we’re pitch­ing for. This book demon­strates very well why real design is a lot more than mere dec­o­ra­tion and why every pixel counts when your site tries to com­mu­ni­cate a brand or mes­sage as clearly as pos­si­ble. Best $30 I spent all year…

Start cre­at­ing bet­ter, more effec­tive designs too. Get “Save The Pixel” through my affil­i­ate link here.

Web Design from Scratch

Ben Hunt’s Web site which claims to be “A com­plete guide to design­ing web sites that work”.

This site is an exten­sive resource that con­tains a lot of free con­tent as well as paid stuff like the “Save the Pixel” book dis­cussed above. One of my great finds of the year.

idea­sonideas

A site I dis­cov­ered through another site’s feed in FeedDemon. IdeasonIdeas touches on a wider vari­ety of sub­jects than pure design talk. One of the recent dis­cus­sions cen­tered on the pros and cons of Requests For Proposal or RFPs and started the dis­cus­sion by stat­ing why they thought they were bad for design­ers and why.

If you’ve ever had to deal with such issues (and what design­ers hasn’t) then you know what a pain and a waste of time RFPs can be. Commenters brought up other good points and that is what that blog is about. Great dis­cus­sions on sub­jects that mat­ter to com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sion­als and brand strategists.

Looking for­ward to 2008

While I don’t like to play the guess­ing game of pre­dict­ing the future, we should prob­a­bly all look ahead to the future now and plan where we’d want this year to take us. Our future is ours to cre­ate and imag­ine so here’s a few things I’m look­ing for­ward to in 2008.

Continuing growth

I’m plant­ing the seeds of a grow­ing busi­ness by re-​designing my own pro­fes­sional Web site. We might all ben­e­fit from re-​visiting our own brand­ing and mar­ket­ing efforts. As a free­lancer it is some­times more dif­fi­cult because what we are mar­ket­ing is our own exper­tise and our brand is our­selves. I’m look­ing for­ward to improv­ing my own mar­ket­ing skills as this will also ben­e­fit my clients.

Waiting for Fireworks CS4

Readers of this blog know how impor­tant Fireworks is to my design process. I have been a vocal Fireworks evan­ge­list for years now. As I stated above, I think that Fireworks CS3 was solid tran­si­tional release under the new care of Adobe. But Fireworks is not with­out prob­lems… In my next post which will be about the year 2007 in soft­ware, I’ll dis­cuss how I now see Fireworks’ place in mine and a typ­i­cal Web designer’s arse­nal and where I would like it to go next.

2008 on Pixelyzed​.com

All in all, 2007 was a great year on many lev­els for me and for the indus­try but I feel it was a tran­si­tional year. I’m really look­ing for­ward to what 2008 brings and hope­fully, some of the big­ger per­sonal changes I have been plan­ning on for a long time will finally hap­pen. Stay tuned!

Regarding the blog, I don’t like to make promises and break them so I will not claim that I will write more often in 2008. All I can promise is that I’ll keep work­ing on build­ing my “voice”. What I try to share with peo­ple here are ideas and resources I feel are worth­while. What this blog and site will never become is a link whore that sim­ply links to other con­tent with lit­tle or no new take on it. If that means I post less often than some other blog­gers because I don’t spread the lat­est “meme” with­out crit­i­cal thought or com­men­tary then so be it.

I will keep speak­ing my mind and try to strike con­ver­sa­tions on issues that mat­ter to me and which I believe should mat­ter to other design professionals.

Thank you very much to all who fol­low this site and blog and those who have com­mented here or sent me e-​mail through­out the year. It’s good to know peo­ple appre­ci­ate what I try to share and care enough to com­ment on it. See you all in 2008!