“Ohh, it´s not there yet, or I have to finish this one thinge here…” Have you ever heard something similar? I have, it was me before I launched my site.

I dont know why but I´ve always been like this. Maybe Seth Godin hit the nail on the head with that Quieting your lizard brain thing. It´s taken me years of practice to get over this type of deal (sometimes). Always thinking a lot and not doing. In fact I´m still doing this with my music, shit! But I can give some insight with this website and how it came into being.

Like all great peaces of art (I dont mean that) it was hard work. I sometimes get the impression from people, and I do this too, that great people that have succeeded in their field came to do that by shear luck on raw natural talent. Like Tiger Woods could drive the ball 300 yards when he first got a club in his hands. No it was hard work for him, and then he enjoyed the fruits of his labour, a lot !

But I postponed launching it for weeks and weeks cause I never thought it was ready. Finally I just said fuck it and launched the damn thing. It was supposed to be a soft launch, I wasn’t gonna tell anybody about it while I fixed the rest of the things that bugged me. Needless to say I was quite shocked when it got into Best Web Gallery and the visits sky rocketed. But nothing would have happened if I would have continued thinking about launching it and never launched.

What I´m trying to say is just do it! Dont think too much, dont let the fear of failure stop you from trying new stuff. Dont let the fear of what other people think of you stop you from doing your best. We always do our best and it´s good enough for the world in it´s entirety. If we fail, we just try again.

• Online backup. I use mozy for online backup. It´s super easy, reliable and it works. I´ve tried restoring stuff from their servers and it went gravy, no problems what so ever. Plus Mozy is real cheap.
• 0 inbox and gmail. I use gmail and I really love gmail. I used to use Apples Mail app but switched from that back and forth between it and gmail. I later decided to solely use gmail cause of the shortcut keys, and the fact you can upload multiple attachments, screenshots you know. I then learned a version of the 0 inbox method, try googling that. It´s basically about not having anything in you inbox that you dont need to act on. Everything else gets archived or deleted. I just love the E key in gmail, sends stuff straight to the archive.
• Online accounting. I use a local system here called Notando, it has a horrid interface at the moment but it sure beats writing out paper invoices and taking them to the post office. Also being able to send invoices every week or every other week keeps the cash flow going, which of course is extremely important for any small company.
• Using the same filing system every time. I´ve used pretty much the same filing system since I started working in this field. Starting out in 3d really forced me to keep my files organized. If you find something that works for you stick to it. I basically just keeps my psd´s in the root of the company folder I´m working on, sub folders for screenshots, logos, images etc. My main working tool is Photoshop so it made sense to have the psd in the root.

These are some of the things I do, of course there´s a lot more. Who knows, maybe I could write some more along these lines.

What do you do to simplify you working day?

I used to create the pattern myself by creating a square pattern and saving it by going, Edit / Define pattern. This method works of course but it´s a drag doing and not all that efficient.

There are a bunch of tutorials around the web on how to do this with the brush. But I find that method to suck somewhat when your doing typical web designer work. It´s very inflexible.

Enter the styles palette
So the quick and easy method is just to use the styles palette. It comes with built in styles and some variations on dotted strokes.

Definitely not rocket science but a much faster and more elegant way to do this. Easy to copy stuff around and change as needed.

There are several versions to chose from, stroke weight, pixel spacing and other stuff. Be sure to try this out and save your self some valuable mouse moving time.

So I decided to make a riveting screencast with a smashing voice over for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy

Image taken from designblurb

I dont consider myself an expert on web standards, far from it. But I know a good thing when I see it and experience it. Ever since reading Jeffrey Zeldman´s book, “Designing with web standards” I´ve been an avid web standards uhhh, guy.

When I got my first job as a web designer / coder I only knew how to use tables for layout. I was quite good at it actually, all those spacer gif´s ahhh, the good old days. The company I worked for had little insight into the div layout thing, it wasnt until I started doing it by my own motivation that we started to do table less layout. And when I read Jeffrey´s book things really started to develop fast for me and the company.

I´ve been reading up on some html 5.0 stuff but at this moment in time it seems like a distant dream, browser support well, sucks! It seems like the browser vendors are doing a bit better on CSS 3.0 than html 5.0 which does help some. But of course there is always one browser (guess who) that is really lagging behind the rest.

I coded my own site to meet the w3c standards and validate. This stuff is actually quite simple, just learn what some of the tags are supposed to do. The p tag is for a paragraph of text. Block-quote is for a quote from someone. H1 is the main headline of the page and you should use h2, h3, h4 etc for the subsequent headlines within the page. Use strong for stuff you want to be bold, it´s really simple when you just read up this stuff. I highly recommend Jeffrey´s book.

gummisig.com block quote

Facebook block quote

A great example of the benefits of correctly marking up you code can be seen when I imported my rss feeds from my site to the notes in Facebook. I actually was a bit surprised, but after getting over that I was like “of course, yeah web standards”, not in a nerdish way of course. Everything looked great in Facebook too, they apparently have also made styles in their css to accommodate for standards. My blockquotes look like blockquotes in the Facebook notes as well.

There are millions of other reasons to code your site with standards, this is just a small one. But it is fun to see the result. This should also look good on handheld devices and rss readers, etc.

Good markup will look good everywhere, except maybe in Internet Explorer, pun intended.