Archive for March, 2009
Great agency blog from Calliope
Many agency blogs are not kept up to date and don’t really contain anything of value or substance. One of the best agency blogs that we have come across recently is from Calliope. Check out their blog here.
It’s a great mix of “how to’s”, industry news and advice. Here’s one on Creating a Publication Blueprint.
Design: Art vs. Process
Successful design has two halves: innovative art and smart processes.
Process? For design?
Many designers shy away from the idea of developing processes for their work because they feel it will restrict their creativity. They think that if they go about producing a design the same way every time, everything they turn out will be uniform, mechanical, and boring.It’s true that too much process and not enough art can result in design with no new innovation. But having processes can also free up the huge part of your brain that focuses on the mundane day-to-day aspects of design to focus on what you really love to do - art.
Setting up your workflow in ProofHQ - post four
This is the fourth of a series of posts showing you different ways to configure ProofHQ to suit the way your organisation works.
ProofHQ is designed to be a simple to use as possible. It is easy to create proofs, easy to review proofs and easy to manage versions. Different companies work in different ways, so there are some things you can do to set-up ProofHQ to fit closely with the way you work. These posts will show you how to do that.
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Adding Freelancers to the Team
Post update - see Knowledge Base.
Setting up your workflow in ProofHQ - post three
This is the third of a series of posts showing you different ways to configure ProofHQ to suit the way your organisation works.
ProofHQ is designed to be a simple to use as possible. It is easy to create proofs, easy to review proofs and easy to manage versions. Different companies work in different ways, so there are some things you can do to set-up ProofHQ to fit closely with the way you work. These posts will show you how to do that.
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Internal Review before sending a proof to clients
Post update - see Knowledge Base.
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Setting up your workflow in ProofHQ - post two
This is the second of a series of posts showing you different ways to configure ProofHQ to suit the way your organisation works.
ProofHQ is designed to be a simple to use as possible. It is easy to create proofs, easy to review proofs and easy to manage versions. Different companies work in different ways, so there are some things you can do to set-up ProofHQ to fit closely with the way you work. These posts will show you how to do that.
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Post update - see Knowledge Base..
Setting up your workflow in ProofHQ - post one
This is the first of a series of posts showing you different ways to configure ProofHQ to suit the way your organisation works.
ProofHQ is designed to be a simple to use as possible. It is easy to create proofs, easy to review proofs and easy to manage versions. Different companies work in different ways, so there are some things you can do to set-up ProofHQ to fit closely with the way you work. These posts will show you how to do that.
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Basic Workflow
Post update - see Knowledge Base.
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Do Elance, Guru and Crowdspring kill the market for freelance designers?
Jeremy Tuber of Being a Starving Graphic Artist Sucks has written a great review based on a recent article in Forbes magazine telling business owners how to cut their design costs using sites like Crowdspring, Elance and Guru.
The article was written in Forbes on February 16th called, “The Creativity of Crowds,” by Christopher Steiner.
Jeremy says that the problem is not that these sites exist - they have been around for years, but that they are creating a cult of “amateur design is acceptable”. Add to this the need for all businesses to save money and professional designers start to feel the squeeze on rates and income.
However, Jeremy counters this by saying that ultimately good design wins because it gets a better result for the client.
Our view is that professional design beats amateur design hands down purely from a business perspective. The way for professional designers to maintain their competitive edge is to be hyper-efficient. Use good systems and processes to produce great design in less time. This means that they can choose to increase their margins, reduce their charge rates or spend more time finding and winning new business.
Good designers who are INEFFICIENT designers lose twice. They make less money and they don’t serve their clients well.
ProofHQ Release - March 2009
Our latest release is now on production and starts to introduce the first of some great new features that we have lined up for the next few months.
This release was once again inspired by lots of vital feedback from clients.
This time round I am going to summarise the release and then write detailed posts on each one.
- Filters proof comments by person and page
- Advanced tools for the proof
- Basecamp integration improvements - ok, bug fixes!!
- Faster servers
- More…
February Service Level Report
Here is our service level report for February:
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Name: ProofHQ Production
Service: HTTP
Host (port): www.proofhq.com (80)
Check period: 3 minutes
# of checks: 11168
# of outages: 0
# of failed : 0
Uptime: 100 %
Avg. response time: 0.148 s
The report is provided by www.serviceuptime.com.