Plucked out of a self-imposed early retirement, we found Daniel teaching several web and business of design related courses at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he has been for the past four years. Before that, he was a New Business Executive for The Chopping Block, where he honed all of his proposal writing and sales chops working with tons of music, media, and entertainment clients.
Fear not though, he’s a stand-up guy who’s far from that sleazy used car salesman type of image you have in your mind!
He also shares his passion for the craft with other industry professionals through his bi-monthly article on the Business of Design for Dynamic Graphics Magazine and has spoken at several conferences on best business practices for designers and the importance of defining the creative process for both clients and designers.
In his free time he enjoys spending time with his wife and son, wandering the streets of NYC with friends, and dreaming under his pear tree in rural upstate NY.
I joined TripIt (my profile) a few months back and have been really impressed. Over that time I’ve gotten manyofmyfriends to drink the TripIt kool-aid. The beauty of TripIt to me is that it prints wonderfully, integrates easily into my LinkedIn profile, and is really a nice travel app that doesn’t let its UI get in the way of doing what I want. But it does have its faults.
Specifically, the biggest fault to me is that it does not yet, after 2 years, have a Facebook App so your friends can see your travel plans. So like a traveler in the desert in search of water, I set my sights on finding some possible way to get my travel plans into Facebook for my friends to see.
There was plenty of talk across the web and even on Facebook as to why TripIt should have a Facebook App, but absolutely nothing on if they had a secret one in development or even have any plans at all to make one.
Then, like an oasis in the distance, I found this blog post right under my nose, at TripIt’s own website! The commenter says that they figured out a work around by actually using TripIt’s competitor, Dopplr, and importing in the calendar from his TripIt ical feed. Ingenious!
From the TripIt homepage, click on the iCal link and copy the iCal address.
I set it up and it works perfectly. I find it quite amusing that users are resorting to using the competitors tools against them so they can enjoy TripIt more. I so wish I had thought of that first!
I get a lot of links sent to me throughout the day and I’ve realized that I often bookmark them and completely forget to share. So to try and be a better blogger I’ll be putting together a post every Monday of the previous weeks links that I thought deserve some attention. Enjoy!
Dave Shea states the obvious (which we’ve all overlooked) and points out that CSS Sprite Optimization is here and should be on every web designer’s mind to increase site load time.
iPhone Art is a gallery of photographs captured with a two megapixel iPhone camera.
Quite a few people have been asking me how I get any work done since they see me conversing on Facebook so much throughout the day. The truth is that I have a secret. I use this wicked awesome Facebook Toolbar for Firefox. The toolbar is great because it gives me quick updates via its iconography if I have new messages, friend invites, group invites, or event invites. It also lets me update my status easily without having to even open the Facebook website. You can also use the toolbar to search or for its quick links to various sections of your profile that you might want to go, but I don’t seem to use either of those features very much. Instead, one of the most widely used features for me is one that you don’t even see in the toolbar….it’s the Growl notifications.
Growl is a great little app that “lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen” (sorry PC lovers). The beauty of it is that my day is already filled with tons of other tasks like writing emails, making phone calls, taking meetings, and writing proposals. This means I get very little time to keep up on what is going on in my social sphere. With the Facebook Toolbar and Growl working together, I literally get short little glimpses into who is doing what throughout my day. If I see something appropriate to me, then I might make a comment in Facebook, if it is not, then I’ve wasted no time. Also, do take into consideration that I don’t just sit at my computer waiting to see what updates come in. I use this Facebook/Growl setup much more like a person would use Twitter – focus on what you see at that specific moment in time.
So how did I get it to work? It can all get a little bit confusing, so here are the exact steps I followed to make it work beautifully.
download Growl, open the disc image, and install the Growl.mpkg
inside that same disc image, go into the Exras folder, then the growlnotify folder, and read the directions in install.txt (you’ll need to use terminal and the command line to install it but don’t worry, it’s super simple – let me know if you have troubles)
in Firefox, go to Tools > Add-ons (this will open up the pref screen for all of your add-ons)
in the Extension Tab, find the Facebook Toolbar and click on Preferences
at the bottom you’ll notice it says “Growl Settings”, check the box next to “Show Facebook Notifications…”
leave the location of Growl Notify as is.
click OK and enjoy!
So there you have it. The secret is out of the bag. If you got stuck or my directions are messed up just leave me a comment and I’ll fix. Happy Facebooking!
on January 30, 2009 at 08:00 AM
filed under: Design
Beautiful exquisite corpse piece. I could stare at this for hours.
Jimmy apRoberts and Brian Christopher present their ongoing collaborative project based on a drawing technique called “Exquisite Corpse.” The technique was invented by Surrealists in 1925 and is based on an old parlour game in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. For this process, only 2 artists are involved, so the drawing becomes sort of a volleyball match. Since each artist only saw a tiny “slice” of the previous panel, neither has any idea what the other is creating. The result is an image greater than the sum of its parts. The artists work 12 panels at a time (considered a “round”) and present their progress upon the completion of each round. Each panel is 32 inches tall, and widths range from 6 to 15 inches.
My new article from my Business of Design column in Dynamic Graphics Magazine is now live on their website. For this article I interviewed many folks around the design and financial industries through the awesome HARO service (which btw, I would highly recommend to anyone needing a quote for their articles). Here’s what it is all about:
Financial responsibility has plagued creatives throughout the history of the world. In art history courses, we learn about famous artists who died penniless and in mental despair. It’s no coincidence these two spheres—creativity and money—are constantly at odds for many graphic designers, especially in these uncertain economic times.
What are the signs a designer isn’t managing his financial future correctly, and what’s the remedy? For this issue, we presented the question to certified financial planners and certified public accountants across the United States. We found a wide array of answers, but the following were mentioned repeatedly…
I stumbled onto this and had to share. Really an awesome overview of the history of the internet and how we got to where we are today. It’s pretty fast but it does a great job of hitting the main points.
“History of the Internet” is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org. You can already download a pre-release of all picol icons on blog.picol.org/pre-release-picol-icons
