I’ve been really interested in organizing all my email messages. But I don’t really want to go through every single message to do that. Today I tried to make some filters in Gmail to at least get some general organization.
First I attempted to get all money related emails into one place.
To do this I looked for all the email addresses of my banks, student loans, online buying/selling, that kind of stuff. At first I was getting every address, but I realized it would be much faster to grab whole domains. So this is what I did.
from:(@cems.wamu.com OR @ebay.com OR @amazon.com OR @wellsfargo.com OR @mint.com OR @checkout.google.com OR @paypal.com OR billing@dreamhost.com)
Then I wanted to try and organize emails with attachments by file type.
For images
Has the words:(.jpg OR .jpeg OR .gif OR .png) has:attachment
For media
Has the words:(.avi OR .mov OR .mp3 OR .m4a) has:attachment
For documents
Has the words:(.pdf OR .doc OR .docx OR .xls OR .xlsx OR .ppt OR .pptx OR .oo3) has:attachment
For design
Has the words:(.ai OR .psd OR .indd OR .qxd) has:attachment
The one problem that I’ve run into so far with this is with PDFs. About half of the pdf emails are related design. This is also a problem with Fireworks PNGs.
This is by no means complete. It is only a quick stab at email organization. Hence “ongoing.” If you have any ideas on how to improve this or any filters you’ve set up that work well, comment.
What is Graphic Design exactly? I really thought I knew, but of late it’s become more confused and gray. Why does Graphic Design exist? The purpose is utility, not art. The purpose of Graphic Design is clear communication. This isn’t meant to be a definite answer, but to start some sort of dialogue about what Graphic Design is.
Working with clients
In this view, a client comes to you with a job. You take the content you and try to mold it into the most compelling outcome. The main feedback that you get is from the client. From my (limited) experience, this is how the print world works. You can propose different ideas to the client and try to sell them on what would work best. It feels very intuitive. Your decisions are often based on experience and what you know has worked in the past.
The economics of Graphic Design
A Graphic Designer is not self sufficient. The very nature of the profession depends upon others. Graphic Designers work for the client, for the money. That’s what it really comes down to. It is love of the the craft, but it does make a living. Thinking about the economics of Graphic Design becomes much more interesting and measurable when it comes to the web. A lot of what I’ve been learning at my new job is this. Design is measured by its success. How many people complete the form? What are the numbers? Do people prefer red to blue? And what not. What is good Graphic Design in this model? Is it good if it sells a lot but looks like garbage?
Aesthetics?
What consideration should be even to aesthetics? In school we learned that good design follows rules (or breaks them eloquently). But what if beauty doesn’t sell? Ideally, design that follows the rules and is built on a grid and is typeset well will sell. I believe this deeply. But what if you can be mathematically proven wrong? If this ad makes a lot of money is it good design? If good design is clear communication and this ad speaks to people who are wanting to refinance their home it must be good design? I know you might think, “of course it isn’t good design.” But it has really got me questioning things. If weird poorly designed (ha!) flash ads work as a marketing tool than who am I to say they aren’t good Graphic Design. Is it me being an elitist? Does it really help anyone for me to ream somebody for having no consideration for typesetting?
Type
Ligatures, kerning, smart quotes, none of these really exist on the web the way they do traditionally in print. This is a real loss to me. I do what I can, but there are many inconsistencies to worry about. There is no way to anticipate for dynamic content. I mean, I have smart quotes happening, I specify font size and line height, but I can’t really force there to be no widows or orphans, especially on content I’m not generating. Also, I use Helvetica for this blog, but if you view it on a Windows machine or even in a feed reader chances are you are reading it in Arial. Helvetica and Arial are 2 fairly different typefaces (to say the least). They look and work in very different ways. They will even render differently render in different browsers on the same operating system. Ugh.
What do you think?
This is not to be a one sided conversation. What do you think makes good design? You don’t have to be a Graphic Designer to answer this. Are you attracted to ads like the one above? Do you gravitate to minimalism and clean design? Do you own a mac? Do you hate anti-aliasing on Windows?
Hello Internet. Though Internet Explorer is an inferior web browser, I know many people still use it. I think most Internet Explorer users fall into two categories: They don’t know any better, or they don’t have a choice. The fact is many people use it. People who come to our site do. In fact about one fourth of all visits come from Internet Explorer users. Worse yet, more than half of these users are on IE6 or older. I have ignored this fact for a long time. I kept telling myself it was a fluke and to not worry about it. But over time it has remained consistent. So, it is time to reconcile.
About two weeks ago I set out to fix my templates to work and look the same for IE as they would for Safari and Firefox. I did most of this in one long day. Most problems were with css layout, but there were a few others that I had to get deeper on.
I fixed alpha transparency on pngs. This is only a problem with IE 6 and older. I use pngs for the header images and for the peace button. Before the fix the images looked like they had a white box behind them. Now they have beautiful transparency. I looked at different solutions for this, but iepngfix was the best and had the least effect on performance.
I fixed the flickering header images. This is another problem that exists in older versions of IE. When the header image was hovered over with the mouse, it would show the hover color underneath. It took a little tinkering to figure out this fix, but the tutorial I linked helped a lot. This was my first time using and understanding what !important means.
It took me a while to figure out these fixes. A lot of searching around. That’s why I’m documenting it here. To bring it all together for people who, like me, don’t bother with IE very much. This is by no means complete or comprehensive. And again, I apologize to all IE users who’ve had a sub par experience here on the site.
I bought my bike about a year and a half ago with the intention of pimping it out. Or maybe not pimping. Pimping usually has to do with adding tons of stuff. More like simplifying my ride. Most parts I’ve bought over time. There was a lot of trial and error in this process.
My bike is a late 80s white Peugeot road bike. (From what I can find I think it’s called Tourmalet.) When I bought it it had most of the original parts, all Shimano grupo, Mavic rims, that kind of stuff. So far I’ve replaced the handle bars with Nitto bull horns from Ben’s Cycle, the saddle with a nice Brooks saddle from IRO, the bottom bracket and cranks with IRO parts from Orange 20, and the back wheel with a cheapo Alex Rims wheel from Coates. I’ve been looking into Velocity Deep-V Rims since the beginning because the are so hot, but I haven’t gotten up the courage to drop $300 on that yet. When I do I think I will put a blue on the front and a white on the back. I want the blue to closely match the top tube pad I bought from R.E.Load.
Well, the future is unknown. This is only one possible direction. Besides who needs Velocity rims, that just makes your bike more valuable to steal.
