Web Worker Daily

As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.

Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites - onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.

These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ - I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context - and in a connected era - is strangely unsociable.

Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.

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When working on the web, an aggravating task is working with images. There are image manipulation software tools, but most are costly and poorly-implemented. Today, Adobe has released a tool that will ease frustration when it comes to working with, sharing, and storing images.

In a long awaited move, Adobe opened the door for mass use of their Adobe Photoshop Express online tool. This web based tool is a diluted version of the very popular (and expensive) Adobe Photoshop application that is the defacto standard for image manipulation. This “cloud based application” allows users a simple way to enhance, share, and store photos.

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